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

Within the context of this thread, your statement would imply that males should be given access to spaces and services where females are vulnerable or exposed as a matter of course, and should only be excluded after they've caused harm.
Well, yes. I do tend to think that criminal prosecution should not only follow a crime, but indeed following a legal hearing to determine whether the crime occurred and whether it was intended. I did not invent the principle of actus reus or mens rea, they have been a part of American law since before we were even a nation. It simply is not legal to punish a person for a crime they have not committed yet, simply because you distrust a demographic to which they belong.
 
Toni, do you genuinely not get the concept here, or are you being contrarian?

Of course some few women have higher sex drives than the average man, just as some few women are taller than the average man. But the reality, which should be uncontroversial, is that men have materially higher sex drives on average, and that extremely few women at all have sex drives higher than the average male sex drive.

You end up sounding like you're insinuating that men and women have the same degree of sex drive and there's no observable difference in the degree of perviness, rapiness, and violence between the sexes. It's a silly thing to latch on to, given that the prevalence of paraphilias is significantly higher in men than in women*, the rates of rape and sexual offending are significantly higher among men than women, and that the volume of violent offenses committed by men is significantly higher than those committed by women. I mean, it's not like it's just a smidge different, it's a lot different.


*Re: paraphilias, the single exception is submissiveness as a paraphilia, which is a bit higher in women than in men.
I’m arguing against the notion that males are inherently more violent or more prone to sexual violence than women. We cannot overlook the role that society plays in assigning certain traits based upon sex/gender.
I think your argument is fallacious, and demonstrably so. I get it though - there was a point in time where I would have argued the same thing, thinking that it was the good feminist thing to do, and that it was necessary for equality.

Not every male is more violent or sexually aggressive than every female, but across the vast majority of mammals, males are more violent and sexually aggressive. Testosterone is a steroid that is present in all mammals. It's present in both sexes, but in almost all mammals it's much higher in males than in females. As a steroid, it has the same effect that all other known steroids have - it increases aggression. Interesting, some few species have evolved such that females have a higher amount of testosterone than male, such as in spotted hyenas - and in spotted hyenas females are more aggressive and violent than males.

In addition to the effect of testosterone, in almost all social mammals, males have a sex-based role that includes protecting pregnant and nursing females and their offspring. Having a higher tendency toward aggression and violence is a selected trait in those social groups.

Do you genuinely believe that girls are taught to not be sexually aggressive and that boys are encouraged to be so? I think this is monumentally wrong - girls are innately less sexually aggressive, and we as a society have invested a lot over the past few thousand years into teaching boys to be less sexually aggressive than they are inherently wired for. I happen to think that's a good thing... but I also recognize that we're actively combating instinct by doing so.

To me, that is as offensive and ignorant as saying that boys are better at math and science and girls are better at cooking.

The difference is that one of these behavioral tendencies (sexual aggression and violence) has a known mechanism (testosterone) and is observable with material significance throughout mammals in a highly consistent way. The other is a capability that has no identifiable mechanism, and which is observed to be untrue on a regular basis.

That said... the best of the best mathematicians are males. Actually, the best of the best of most skills are held by males. In almost every non-physical capability, the means for men and women are fairly close to each other, but the standard deviations are very different. Women have smaller variances, producing a "peakier" distribution with shorter tails, whereas men have larger variances producing a "flatter" distribution with longer tails. So while men might corner the market on the "top end" outliers... they also corner the market on the low end. The absolute smartest person on the planet is statistically far more likely to be male than female... but the absolute dumbest one is also going to be a dude.

None of that is proscriptive, which is important to note. Just because men are more likely to come out with a ground-breaking physicist doesn't at all imply that women can't be extraordinary physicists too. And it certainly doesn't imply that women shouldn't pursue physics as a career, let alone that women should be prohibited from studying physics.
1. Not all steroids cause increased aggression. Your facts are wrong there. BTW, women also have testosterone as well as other androgens. Androgens serve important purposes for everyone.

2. I absolutely do believe that boys are encouraged to be aggressive and to deal with their feelings (all of them) with, overall, more aggressive strategies rather than by...feeling them, talking about them, giving their feelings names and words to describe and strategies to deal with feelings effectively. Boys are taught to be tough, to toughen up, to be a man all of which seems to mean to suppress fear and feelings of gentleness in favor of bravado and physical and verbal aggression. I don't think this is done (anymore) very intentionally but it is still a big insult for boys to be called wimps or girls. Boys are frequently given toy weapons to play with and are encouraged to be physically active (although this physical activity unfortunately has diminished in favor of screen time--but many/most screen games are extremely violent and often very misogynistic). Yes, yes, boys are more likely to be allowed to have dolls or stuffies to play with and cuddle and (thankfully) more fathers are involved in caring for, not merely disciplining children or roughhousing with them. Boys often show support by trading insults (aggression) and are discouraged from sharing hugs with other boys in non-sexual ways.

Girls are still more heavily encouraged to notice the feelings of others and to respond to their feelings, to offer comfort and conciliation. Yes, yes, girls play sports now, including contact sports but how girls behave on say, a soccer pitch is different than how boys behave on a soccer pitch. Girls are more obviously supportive of one another, for example and show support verbally. Girls are still encouraged to care very much about their looks rather than their comfort and to manage their feelings and the feelings of those around them.

Unfortunately, not all stereotypes have died.

3. Women have always excelled in mathematics and hard sciences such as physics. However, their accomplishments have often been overlooked, stolen through mis-accreditation or simply buried. Socially, girls are encouraged to pursue more 'feminine' career paths such as teaching, nursing, other 'helping' professions rather than those which are physically demanding or require high level mathematical or scientific skills. In part, girls are so encouraged because it is believed that it is easier for girls who wish to marry and have children (deliberate pairing there) or just have children to balance that sort of career with childrearing compared with some other typically thought of as male careers. It isn't just society as a whole which does this but parents do it as well. I also know how easily this plants self-doubt into the minds of girls and young women who hear that they can do everything that a man can do but for practical reasons, they should consider what will pair well with raising a family.

My observation is that people fall into various survival strategies: fight, freeze or flight. I would also add avoid/placate. I am female and I tend towards fight. I am not certain if this is my natural way of behaving or whether it has simply been conditioned into me by the necessity of defending myself physically so that it has become my nature. But there you have it. My husband is a more gentle soul and avoids fights whenever he can. That seems to be his nature. His parents were also more mild mannered. Not that he cannot or will not fight back if necessary but it is not his go to. For me, I learned a long time ago that in certain situations, placation and avoidance are not sufficient and so I'm more inclined to shut that shit down ASAP in no uncertain terms. Less problematic in my old age. Seriously, I got so that I could shut that shit down with a look. It took a while to get that way: I had to unlearn being nice and placating. And I had to deal with a lot less shit. And now I can be nice but very few people do not know that I will not suffer fools.
 
I’m arguing against the notion that males are inherently more violent or more prone to sexual violence than women. We cannot overlook the role that society plays in assigning certain traits based upon sex/gender.
That's classic blank-slate ideology, not a parsimonious hypothesis to account for the evidence. From Donald Brown's famous list of human universals:

males dominate public/political realm

males engage in more coalitional violence

males more aggressive

males more prone to lethal violence

males more prone to theft​

"Human universals" means anthropologists have found the characteristics on Dr. Brown's list in every single society they've checked for them in.

Moreover, males are more violent than females in most other ape and old-world monkey species too. The possibility that our nearest relatives are like this because they inherited an instinct for it from our common ancestor, but the human lineage lost the genes for the instinct, and we're like this for a completely different reason: because every single society socializes children to learn to behave as if they still had the instinct, is improbable to the point of being fanciful. It's part and parcel with the ever-popular conviction that, yes, okay, our fingers and livers and whatnot can have evolved from monkeys', fine; but no, not our minds! It's that little bit of pre-Copernican view of man as the center of the universe that the scientific revolution couldn't wipe out from the public consciousness.

To me, that is as offensive and ignorant as saying that boys are better at math and science and girls are better at cooking.
Judging a factual hypothesis based on how offensive it is instead of based on how well it accounts for observations is wishful thinking in action.
 
Yes, I think it would be more correct and appropriate to describe restrooms as gender-divided, not sex-divided, just as I think gender reveal parties are misnamed. But me protesting these things doesn't change the language with which most people do and will describe them.
Well, in UK law they’re sex-divided, not gender-divided. The Equality Act allows for discrimination on the basis of biological sex in some circumstances. As the Supreme Court went through in detail, the alternative reading of the Act, that sex meant certificated sex, was incoherent and unworkable.
 
Within the context of this thread, your statement would imply that males should be given access to spaces and services where females are vulnerable or exposed as a matter of course, and should only be excluded after they've caused harm.
Well, yes. I do tend to think that criminal prosecution should not only follow a crime, but indeed following a legal hearing to determine whether the crime occurred and whether it was intended. I did not invent the principle of actus reus or mens rea, they have been a part of American law since before we were even a nation. It simply is not legal to punish a person for a crime they have not committed yet, simply because you distrust a demographic to which they belong.
Again, requiring males to stay out of female spaces does not equate to criminal prosecution. It’s respecting the rights and dignity of women to have male free spaces in some circumstances.
 
Are you using the terms sex and gender to mean different things?
Sex and gender do mean different things, in the English language as commonly used today among sociologists and progressives.
FIFY.

According to Merriam-Webster:
gender
noun
gen·der ˈjen-dər
plural genders

1 a: a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms
see also natural gender
b: membership of a word or a grammatical form in such a subclass
c: an inflectional form (see inflection sense 2a) showing membership in such a subclass
2 a: sex sense 1a
the feminine gender
b: the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex
c: gender identity​

As you can see from definition 2a, in the English language as commonly used today and not just in the 19th century, using gender and sex to mean exactly the same thing is perfectly standard.

But you and your "gender-critical" friends insist on replacing the word gender with sex, seemingly in all cases, because you never studied the social sciences and aren't familiar with the terminology you're using. Whatever. Bring back the 19th century, I guess. Enjoy your corsets?
Get a grip. Sociologists do not own the English language. Repurposing an old word to use as technical jargon doesn't make the people who continue to use it with its preexisting meaning wrong, or ignorant, or unfamiliar. You might as well hear someone speaking English and infer it's "because you never studied French" -- it's sheer snobbery.

In any case, what you call them has no bearing on the use of the rooms in question or how they are regulated.
[/QUOTE]
 
As you can see from definition 2a, in the English language as commonly used today and not just in the 19th century, using gender and sex to mean exactly the same thing is perfectly standard.
That does not contradict anything I wrote... I fully agree with how Mirriam Webster defines gender here. But what they wrote is not what you're saying in your post. The dictionary does not take a position on whether using definition 1, 2, or 3 makes one a snob. The difference between dictionary subdefinitions is always contextual. I note that literally everyone in this thread has been repeatedly using sex and gender to refer to different things, so if I'm a progressive snob I'm in good company.
 
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Within the context of this thread, your statement would imply that males should be given access to spaces and services where females are vulnerable or exposed as a matter of course, and should only be excluded after they've caused harm.
Well, yes. I do tend to think that criminal prosecution should not only follow a crime, but indeed following a legal hearing to determine whether the crime occurred and whether it was intended. I did not invent the principle of actus reus or mens rea, they have been a part of American law since before we were even a nation. It simply is not legal to punish a person for a crime they have not committed yet, simply because you distrust a demographic to which they belong.
Again, requiring males to stay out of female spaces does not equate to criminal prosecution. It’s respecting the rights and dignity of women to have male free spaces in some circumstances.
It does if you make it a crime, and prosecute it.
 
I’m arguing against the notion that males are inherently more violent or more prone to sexual violence than women. We cannot overlook the role that society plays in assigning certain traits based upon sex/gender.
That's classic blank-slate ideology, not a parsimonious hypothesis to account for the evidence. From Donald Brown's famous list of human universals:

males dominate public/political realm​
males engage in more coalitional violence​
males more aggressive​
males more prone to lethal violence​
males more prone to theft​

"Human universals" means anthropologists have found the characteristics on Dr. Brown's list in every single society they've checked for them in.

Moreover, males are more violent than females in most other ape and old-world monkey species too. The possibility that our nearest relatives are like this because they inherited an instinct for it from our common ancestor, but the human lineage lost the genes for the instinct, and we're like this for a completely different reason: because every single society socializes children to learn to behave as if they still had the instinct, is improbable to the point of being fanciful. It's part and parcel with the ever-popular conviction that, yes, okay, our fingers and livers and whatnot can have evolved from monkeys', fine; but no, not our minds! It's that little bit of pre-Copernican view of man as the center of the universe that the scientific revolution couldn't wipe out from the public consciousness.

To me, that is as offensive and ignorant as saying that boys are better at math and science and girls are better at cooking.
Judging a factual hypothesis based on how offensive it is instead of based on how well it accounts for observations is wishful thinking in action.
Now, separate out the societal influences from the biological influences.

A hypothesis is neither factual or not factual. It is a question.
 
Judging a hypothesis as offensive and ignorant, not on the evidence, but because you don’t like it, is silly.
 
A hypothesis is neither factual or not factual. It is a question.
That's not how it was explained to me in elementary school science class.
A hypothesis is an educated guess that can be tested and falsified. Or supported, which in this case would include the behavior of other similar species.

Trying to distinguish between the instinctive behavior and the societal influences that results is like trying to unscramble an egg. Nearly impossible and not particularly useful. All the evidence is going to be highly subjective and won't change anything important.
Tom
 
A hypothesis is neither factual or not factual. It is a question.
That's not how it was explained to me in elementary school science class.
A hypothesis is an educated guess that can be tested and falsified. Or supported, which in this case would include the behavior of other similar species.

Trying to distinguish between the instinctive behavior and the societal influences that results is like trying to unscramble an egg. Nearly impossible and not particularly useful. All the evidence is going to be highly subjective and won't change anything important.
Tom
I’ve taken a lot more than elementary school science.

Please Google the definition. Yes, I could cut and paste but I think you need to learn how to do things, learn things —and think things for yourself.
 
...
Judging a factual hypothesis based on how offensive it is instead of based on how well it accounts for observations is wishful thinking in action.
Now, separate out the societal influences from the biological influences.
Been there; done that. That was the whole point of bringing up human universals and closely related species. If it were due to societal influences then we'd probably find some societies where women are more violent or where the sexes are equally violent; and if it were due to societal influences then there'd be two causes for monkey male-pattern violence when one is sufficient explanation, going against Occam's Razor.

And actually, the case is even stronger than that, because we know the mechanism -- see Emily's observations upthread about testosterone in female hyenas. Human boys didn't get more testosterone than human girls due to societal influences.

A hypothesis is neither factual or not factual. It is a question.
By "factual hypothesis" I meant a hypothesis about a matter of fact, as opposed to a hypothesis about policy such as "Deporting ten million illegal aliens will be good for America." If you want to judge policy hypotheses by their offensiveness, knock yourself out.
 
...
Judging a factual hypothesis based on how offensive it is instead of based on how well it accounts for observations is wishful thinking in action.
Now, separate out the societal influences from the biological influences.
Been there; done that. That was the whole point of bringing up human universals and closely related species. If it were due to societal influences then we'd probably find some societies where women are more violent or where the sexes are equally violent; and if it were due to societal influences then there'd be two causes for monkey male-pattern violence when one is sufficient explanation, going against Occam's Razor.

And actually, the case is even stronger than that, because we know the mechanism -- see Emily's observations upthread about testosterone in female hyenas. Human boys didn't get more testosterone than human girls due to societal influences.

A hypothesis is neither factual or not factual. It is a question.
By "factual hypothesis" I meant a hypothesis about a matter of fact, as opposed to a hypothesis about policy such as "Deporting ten million illegal aliens will be good for America." If you want to judge policy hypotheses by their offensiveness, knock yourself out.
There is no such thing as a ‘factual’ hypothesis. Or an unfactual one. Only supported or unsupported.

I seriously don’t think you’ve ’been there done that’ about anything not involving a keyboard and two fingers. Or maybe one.
 
There is no such thing as a ‘factual’ hypothesis. Or an unfactual one. Only supported or unsupported.
And the hypothesis that is consistently supported is that males and females are different in some important ways. Much of that has little or nothing to do with socializing.
Tom
 
That does not contradict anything I wrote... I fully agree with how Mirriam Webster defines gender here. But what they wrote is not what you're saying in your post. The dictionary does not take a position on whether using definition 1, 2, or 3 makes one a snob. The difference between dictionary subdefinitions is always contextual. I note that literally everyone in this thread has been repeatedly using sex and gender to refer to different things, so if I'm a progressive snob I'm in good company.
:picardfacepalm:

You might as well hear someone speaking English and infer it's "because you never studied French" -- it's sheer snobbery.
By that logic, anyone who studies any field or picks up any trade with specialized knowledge is a "snob".
:picardfacepalm:

Don't be daft. I didn't say using definition 2b is snobby; I said saying:

But you and your "gender-critical" friends insist on replacing the word gender with sex, seemingly in all cases, because you never studied the social sciences and aren't familiar with the terminology you're using. Whatever. Bring back the 19th century, I guess. Enjoy your corsets?​

is snobby! You have no grounds for assuming their choice to stick with conventional usage instead of conforming to your subculture's jargon means they don't know how.

Oh, and by the way, you wrote "You ... insist on replacing the word gender with sex, seemingly in all cases" and "literally everyone in this thread has been repeatedly using sex and gender to refer to different things". When you're contradicting yourself try not to be quite so blatant about it.
 
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That does not contradict anything I wrote... I fully agree with how Mirriam Webster defines gender here. But what they wrote is not what you're saying in your post. The dictionary does not take a position on whether using definition 1, 2, or 3 makes one a snob. The difference between dictionary subdefinitions is always contextual. I note that literally everyone in this thread has been repeatedly using sex and gender to refer to different things, so if I'm a progressive snob I'm in good company.
:picardfacepalm:

You might as well hear someone speaking English and infer it's "because you never studied French" -- it's sheer snobbery.
By that logic, anyone who studies any field or picks up any trade with specialized knowledge is a "snob".
:picardfacepalm:

Don't be daft. I didn't say using definition 2b is snobby; I said saying:

But you and your "gender-critical" friends insist on replacing the word gender with sex, seemingly in all cases, because you never studied the social sciences and aren't familiar with the terminology you're using. Whatever. Bring back the 19th century, I guess. Enjoy your corsets?​

is snobby! You have no grounds for assuming their choice to stick with conventional usage instead of conforming to your subculture's jargon means they don't know how.

Oh, and by the way, you wrote "You ... insist on replacing the word gender with sex, seemingly in all cases" and "literally everyone in this thread has been repeatedly using sex and gender to refer to different things". When you're contradicting yourself try not to be quite so blatant about it.
Whereas dragging out a dictionary, pushing up your wireframes, and going "WELL AKSHULLY" makes you an easy going man-of-the-people, I suppose?

:LOL:

And "my subculture" - the sciences - are supposedly the topic of the thread, so I do not think they are irrelevant to it.
 
A hypothesis is neither factual or not factual. It is a question.
By "factual hypothesis" I meant a hypothesis about a matter of fact, as opposed to a hypothesis about policy such as "Deporting ten million illegal aliens will be good for America." If you want to judge policy hypotheses by their offensiveness, knock yourself out.
There is no such thing as a ‘factual’ hypothesis. Or an unfactual one. Only supported or unsupported.
Why did you write that? I told you what I meant by the phrase and you quoted it back to me. Are you seriously contending that there's no such thing as a hypothesis about a matter of fact? Or are you just insisting that "factual hypothesis" must only be used to refer to whichever nonexistent thing you have in mind and never to the existing thing we're discussing in the thread? If the latter, hey, use the phrase however you like. It's a free country. ( :rolleyesa: Linguistic prescriptivists [/mutter] )

<empty insult snipped>
 
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