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

[Politesse]

I'm childless; and "Hit or be hit" is a description of a world where everyone takes what he thinks he needs, not a world of property rights. Property rights are what make it possible to settle resource allocation disagreements without anyone hitting anyone.

A baseball field maintained by the city isn't "your property". Neither is a public university.

If I pay taxes to maintain something, why shouldn't I have access to every single program it has to offer? If one sex is not allowed to use the field, they should not have pay for it either.

Or to put it another way, why would anyone consent, in the long run, to pay taxes to a government that formally discriminates against them when it comes to the services those taxes supposedly provide? You pretend to be a realist, but you're not looking at the broader picture of what happens when conservative governments start to wield power more as clients to wealthy families than as servants to their people. It's not stable or ideal; it's the start of the cycle.

 

[Emily Lake]

Therefore, any male that says they identify as a woman must be granted access by law to female services, spaces, and athletics.

Again, I tend to agree with this as a question of morality, but disagree that the government should be enforcing any one culture's views over anothers on "services, spaces, and athletics" should be allowed for whom. That can only lead to conflict, inequality, and ultimately violence.

Let me rephrase what you seem to be saying.

You believe that any male that says a specific phrase should have the moral right to use female services, spaces, and athletics, solely on the basis of them having said a specific phrase.

You further believe that disallowing males who say that specific phrase from using female intimate spaces and services will lead to violence and inequality... for the males who said that specific phrase?

Do you believe that there is any risk at all to females when you give males access to female intimate spaces on the basis of nothing more than a specific phrase?

Knew you were going to do that. Classic alt-right exchange. Demand a long-ass post detailing my position, that takes a half hour to write out a thoughtful response to, kvetch that Im not "engaging" with you if I refuse to play ball, but once I do, ignoring the contents of that response entirely, choosing instead to just repeat the same taglines you started out with as though they were a response, despite having nothing particularly obvious to do with my post.

This is blatant dishonesty, apparent to anyone who has eyeballs. I responded quite comprehensively to everything you wrote, and I carved out two specific items to separate posts to stand on their own. You pretending otherwise is not a good-faith engagement, and can't reasonably be described as honest.

I'm not doing another one of these! If you can't discuss things in even a semblance of good faith, why are you so confident that people will want to hear your opinions on anything?

Or... and hear me out... you could read my very long response to your very long post, and not dissemble by pretending it doesn't exist!

 

[Emily Lake]

People should not be denied participation in sports for which they qualify on the basis of their physical sex, and should be given the right by law to participate on the basis of their gender identity.

"Should not" in the moral sense? I would agree with that. I think it is very wrong to make children, especially, targets for social rejection and violence on the basis of social norms they have no real power to affect.

Politically and legally, I don't think the government should be telling people who can or cannot participate in a sport in the first place, let alone with formal sex discrimination as their sole guide to enforcing said rules. Why would anyone consent to that? If that had always been the law, women would not be allowed to participate in most sports, as they were historically barred from them in almost all cases, and were only able to change those conventions by violating perceptively male spaces (and, once again, sartorial rules).

Do you think that the government should never have passed Title IX at all?

But since you bring it up:

Title IX is one of the most important amendments in the history of the Federal Education Code, and I support it wholeheartedly. I also routinely advise and inform my students as to their rights under Title IX, and assist them in securing those rights should they need it. Patsy Matsu Mink, who helped rescue the bill when it was being ripped to shreds in the House, is another personal hero of mine.

Title IX explicitly forbids discriminating on the basis of sex, including within the domain of sports, including every form of exclusion on the basis of sex, such as attempting to expel someone from a program because you believe them to be of the "wrong" sex as you have been advocating for in this thread. It is not in any way a hindrance to gender equality in athletics, on the contrary it created considerably more weight to existing state and federal guidelines requiring equality of opportunity for all students regardless of sex. Quite revolutionary in 1972, and still controversial as we can plainly see.

Let me get this straight... you take the position that Title IX's requirements for providing equal participation on the basis of sex for athletics means that males should get to participate on female teams if they have special feelings, even if the real impact of this is to reduce both the ability and the opportunity for female students to engage in athletics?

And you think that me wanting to retain single-sex athletics is somehow in violation of Title IX's intent?

Do you also argue that 22 year old's who say they have youthful feelings should be allowed by law to participate on an under 10 sports team, because to do otherwise would be age discrimination?

Are you aware that your TERF buddies are currently trying to have Title IX eviscerated once again? Some friends! They would have women bullied out of the colleges altogether if they could, but they'll settle for sports teams if that's all they can get.

Are you high? Seriously, this interpretation is not rational at all, not even close.

 

[Emily Lake]

Our ability to easily identify which sex another person is may be more difficult.

Trans Or Not Quiz: Can You Spot The Difference?

Do you think you’ve got a sharp eye? Take our trans or not quiz and put your instincts to the test! This fun and lighthearted challenge is designed to see if you can identify subtle details about appearances and expressions. No matter if you’re a pro at spotting differences or simply curious...

www.proprofs.com

My score. 11 correct out of 20. Can you do better?

ETA: Sorry, not just Emily.

If I put on a really good costume, use some really good photo filters, and get the lighting just right... you won't be able to tell that I'm not a real gorilla either.

 

[Emily Lake]

Right here, in one single post, you're conflating different meanings of the word sex. It's particularly blatant, because you're conflating a noun and a verb.

Only if you insist that sex is determined solely by the compliment of X and Y chromosomes. Which is fine if you are talking about reproduction—although technically, some species, including a few vertebrae, utilize parthenogenesis for reproduction.

Sex is a reproductive class within an anisogamous species. Parthenogenesis occurs in species that are NOT anisogamous*. So it has nothing to do with this classification.

You really seem to be struggling with this. So let's talk about bees. Bees have three forms within their species, and two sexes. They have queens, which are fertile sexually mature females of the species, and they're shaped differently, they look different, and are distinctly identifiable as queens within any colony. Workers are sterile females that never develop sexual maturity at all; they're shaped differently from queens and are distinctly identifiable based on their structure and form. Drones are fertile sexually mature males of the species, which are also distinctly identifiable from queens and workers based on their structures and their form.

Would you take the position that bees have an indeterminate number of forms, because sex is really complex and biology is really complicated? Do you think that some workers are actually queens, and that some queens are actually drones?

But we are talking humans and sex does not refer only to copulation.

And here you've substituted a verb for a noun. I don't know why you've done this, since the context of the discussion has been about the noun.

Humans most frequently engage in sex with no intention of reproducing and often take great pains to prevent pregnancy or engage in sex acts which cannot result in pregnancy. And we all know that reproduction can happen without copulation.

I honestly don't even know where to fo with this. You're acting as if humans being able to develop technology to alter reproduction somehow invalidates both the history of our evolution and the innate prompts that have resulted from that evolution. Seriously, you're acting like somehow us having invented nutritional supplements invalidates our evolution as an omnivorous species with a reliance on animal-based proteins, and simultaneously eradicates the innate drive to eat meat. Just because we've found a way to work around nature doesn't mean that nature doesn't exist at all.

In humans, the word sex can refer to a variety of sex acts, the external genitalia present, to determine the sex of something or to make more exciting.

Mmmhmm. And which of those are we talking about here?

Are you under the impression that when I say "sex-specific intimate spaces" I'm talking about bordellos?

 

[Emily Lake]

No, Title IX forbids exclusions on the basis of sex. I understand that you are confused about the distinction between equitable and discriminatory law, but the education code as presently written is not. In order to get what you want for American schoolchildren, you need Trump's attack on Title IX to succeed, and the legacy of Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink to be dismantled.

So you object to separate men’s and women’s sports?

Why isn’t the ACLU campaigning for that?

No, separate men and women's leagues are acceptable under Title IX, as long as both options exist. If there is only a men's league or only a women's league, though, people of the opposite sex must be allowed to participate in it if they wish.

This is some stoner-level interpretation of Title IX.

 

[Toni]

Right here, in one single post, you're conflating different meanings of the word sex. It's particularly blatant, because you're conflating a noun and a verb.

Only if you insist that sex is determined solely by the compliment of X and Y chromosomes. Which is fine if you are talking about reproduction—although technically, some species, including a few vertebrae, utilize parthenogenesis for reproduction.

Sex is a reproductive class within an anisogamous species. Parthenogenesis occurs in species that are NOT anisogamous*. So it has nothing to do with this classification.

You really seem to be struggling with this. So let's talk about bees. Bees have three forms within their species, and two sexes. They have queens, which are fertile sexually mature females of the species, and they're shaped differently, they look different, and are distinctly identifiable as queens within any colony. Workers are sterile females that never develop sexual maturity at all; they're shaped differently from queens and are distinctly identifiable based on their structure and form. Drones are fertile sexually mature males of the species, which are also distinctly identifiable from queens and workers based on their structures and their form.

Would you take the position that bees have an indeterminate number of forms, because sex is really complex and biology is really complicated? Do you think that some workers are actually queens, and that some queens are actually drones?

But we are talking humans and sex does not refer only to copulation.

And here you've substituted a verb for a noun. I don't know why you've done this, since the context of the discussion has been about the noun.

Humans most frequently engage in sex with no intention of reproducing and often take great pains to prevent pregnancy or engage in sex acts which cannot result in pregnancy. And we all know that reproduction can happen without copulation.

I honestly don't even know where to fo with this. You're acting as if humans being able to develop technology to alter reproduction somehow invalidates both the history of our evolution and the innate prompts that have resulted from that evolution. Seriously, you're acting like somehow us having invented nutritional supplements invalidates our evolution as an omnivorous species with a reliance on animal-based proteins, and simultaneously eradicates the innate drive to eat meat. Just because we've found a way to work around nature doesn't mean that nature doesn't exist at all.

In humans, the word sex can refer to a variety of sex acts, the external genitalia present, to determine the sex of something or to make more exciting.

Mmmhmm. And which of those are we talking about here?

Are you under the impression that when I say "sex-specific intimate spaces" I'm talking about bordellos?

I’m glad you saw my point. Sex means multiple things.

 

[Emily Lake]

Well I’m being told different things.

Is it permissible to have separate sex categories in sport, discriminating on the basis of sex?

Yes. It has been the practice in the USA and the Olympics for decades.

Explain that to @Politesse. They keep insisting that Title IX forbids it.

Honestly, I think Poli is doing a semantics dance. For nearly all my life women and females were synonymous. Now they are separate concepts. But Title IX has been around awhile and may still refer to females as women or girls.
Tom

It's worse than just a semantics dance. The language of Title IX refers to sex.

 

[Emily Lake]

Politesse was just talking shit.

I definitely know about Title IX, how it is applied, how it isn't applied, and why the government is currently suing itself to try and change it without the consent of Congress. You could easily learn about these things as well. Even if you don't trust me, none of this is secret, nor difficult to learn about with a few minutes of googling.

Poli's advice on Title IX: You're allowed to have separate male and female sports teams, but only if you let males participate on the female teams if they feel like it.

Because that's what really equality and equity is all about - making sure that males get to do whatever they want, and females will just learn their place and stay silent about it.

 

[Emily Lake]

Is that a difficult question?

Believe it or not not all of us have as much free time as you seem to have and I’m certain none of us feels any particular need to await your next inquiry.

seanie has apparently been a member here since 2002, posted occasionally about UK politics (particularly Brexit) back in 2019, and about Covid during the height of the pandemic, but otherwise has posted about nothing except trans issues. Each time a thread related to trans issues has arisen, they have posted obsessively in that thread. Their last two hundred posts on the forum were all in this thread. The vast majority of their posting history is found in half a dozen threads, all of which are about trans issues.

I don't think it's about having more free time, but rather about devoting literally all of their free time to a single monomanaical interest.

As an alternative explanation... This place is largely an echo chamber, and most of us agree on the vast majority of things. There's still some argument in really technical topics, but then you only get a very few people taking part because only a few have the technical expertise to even follow it. Most of us at this point are just plain worn out by arguing religion and the existence of gods, and most of us aren't going to spend hours a day studying the bible to intricate levels just to be able to argue some minutiae with true believers. Plus, there are a whole lot of us who don't get any enjoyment from the non-stop circle-jerk of "Trump bad, anyone not Progressive is indistinguishable from a nazi" so we just don't take part.

In reality, there are only a very few topics where major disagreements exist. Those topics are going to generate a much higher level of participation.

This is one of those topics.

Even more, this is a topic where adherents to the "transwomen are really actually women" side of this rely on completely unscientific, untestable, and subjective beliefs to make their arguments, which is in direct contradiction to the premise of IIDB in the first place.

 

[Emily Lake]

But you know, I prefer harmless obsessions, all things considered. A hate-on for a particular minority group is not a healthy thing to let dominate every social interaction.

This is the sort of post that puts the lie to all of your insistence that people should be respectful and nice toward you.

 

[Politesse]

But you know, I prefer harmless obsessions, all things considered. A hate-on for a particular minority group is not a healthy thing to let dominate every social interaction.

This is the sort of post that puts the lie to all of your insistence that people should be respectful and nice toward you.

When have I ever insisted on any such thing? I'm not a hypocritical moralizing jerk. If you want to be an asshole to other people, be my guest, just don't pretend your shit doesn't stink just as bad as theirs.

 

[Emily Lake]

The fence you call it "justice" to tear down is the fence that keeps the baseball field available for baseball. So I'll ask again: why would there still be a baseball game going on there in the absence of any "systemic barrier" preventing every random person who thinks he has a better use for the land from accessing it equally however he pleases and making baseball games infeasible?

If you prefer a wealthy society for a privileged class to a just and equitable one for all, fine, but if you're pretending that wealth and privilege are justice and equity, that's delusional. If you believe that tearing down fences would ruin the game, you might be right, but if your solution is to just keep the fence up, that is neither justice nor equity.

This is about to veer far off topic... but this notion that private property is somehow an affront to others, paired with the insinuation that all fences are somehow bad, is naive and unsophisticated. You're doing a really good job of not explicitly saying so, but the tacit thrust of your post is the complete elimination of property rights.

It's just a fuckin' fence, you know? Everyone over the age of two knows what those mean.

It often means there's an angry bull on the other side.

 

[Toni]

Politesse was just talking shit.

I definitely know about Title IX, how it is applied, how it isn't applied, and why the government is currently suing itself to try and change it without the consent of Congress. You could easily learn about these things as well. Even if you don't trust me, none of this is secret, nor difficult to learn about with a few minutes of googling.

Poli's advice on Title IX: You're allowed to have separate male and female sports teams, but only if you let males participate on the female teams if they feel like it.

Because that's what really equality and equity is all about - making sure that males get to do whatever they want, and females will just learn their place and stay silent about it.

No but thanks for embracing the MAGA version. Because that’s where all this fear mongering comes from.

I’m old enough that I was not allowed to play competitive high school sports beyond intramural basketball. In my last year of high school, girls were finally going to be allowed to have a track team. My friends and I were so stoked. Family circumstances kept me from doing any extracurriculars. No ones’ fault: just a freak thing that happened.

Trust me, I raged during high school at all the ridiculous restrictions placed upon girls. I was over the moon about Title IX finally being recognized by my high school,

I also have worried about girls being crowded out of their hard won victory. That does not seem to be what has happened. There are a small number of trans girls on girl’s teams —because there is a small number of trans girls, period. Trans girls do not seem to have any real advantage. Yes, I’ve read stories about trans girls ‘stealing’ place medals but those have been exaggerated to the point of being false. I’m not particularly worried. Yes, locker rooms need to be handled sensitively for everyone’s sake.

I DO worry more about pro women’s sports, if they ever start to be financially remunerative enough to attract males who are willing to go to a pretty big extreme to be able to be pro.

 

[Toni]

The fence you call it "justice" to tear down is the fence that keeps the baseball field available for baseball. So I'll ask again: why would there still be a baseball game going on there in the absence of any "systemic barrier" preventing every random person who thinks he has a better use for the land from accessing it equally however he pleases and making baseball games infeasible?

If you prefer a wealthy society for a privileged class to a just and equitable one for all, fine, but if you're pretending that wealth and privilege are justice and equity, that's delusional. If you believe that tearing down fences would ruin the game, you might be right, but if your solution is to just keep the fence up, that is neither justice nor equity.

This is about to veer far off topic... but this notion that private property is somehow an affront to others, paired with the insinuation that all fences are somehow bad, is naive and unsophisticated. You're doing a really good job of not explicitly saying so, but the tacit thrust of your post is the complete elimination of property rights.

It's just a fuckin' fence, you know? Everyone over the age of two knows what those mean.

It often means there's an angry bull on the other side.

Haven’t encountered any angry bulls and I grew up in farm country where cattle are being barbed wire or electric fences. You can see a ball game really well through those.

OTOH, there is a tremendous amount of bullshit comprising a whole lotta other kinds of walls.

 

[seanie]

By operating men's and women's sports, but not excluding on the basis of sex.

So any man can play women’s sports?

What a dumb system.

 

[Politesse]

Politesse was just talking shit.

I definitely know about Title IX, how it is applied, how it isn't applied, and why the government is currently suing itself to try and change it without the consent of Congress. You could easily learn about these things as well. Even if you don't trust me, none of this is secret, nor difficult to learn about with a few minutes of googling.

Poli's advice on Title IX: You're allowed to have separate male and female sports teams, but only if you let males participate on the female teams if they feel like it.

Because that's what really equality and equity is all about - making sure that males get to do whatever they want, and females will just learn their place and stay silent about it.

If you can think of some other legal way to implement the law as it is currently written, feel free to suggest that. Otherwise your options are to either break the law or change the law. The Trump administration is choosing both of those options, depending on state. What do you think should be done? Violate the law, or eviscerate Title IX? You asked me if I supported Ttitle IX, and my answer was an unequivocal yes. Not only do I support it, I'm often in the position of executing certain Title IX provisions, like providing assistance to students who have been incorrectly barred from services, or who have been victims of sexual assault and are seeking redress or accomodations. Title IX is very much a part of my daily life, and I have never objected to that.

I'm assuming your asnwer is a much more equivocal yes, that you feel Title IX needs to be changed, but you have yet to actually say whether you support the right-wing assault on Title IX or not.

 

[Politesse]

By operating men's and women's sports, but not excluding on the basis of sex.

So any man can play women’s sports?

What a dumb system.

And women can play "men's sports". Most of the "women's leagues" you are supposedly defending only exist because brave women and girls first stepped forward and demanded access to male-only teams, classes, and facilities, at significant personal risk to themselves.

 

[seanie]

So why have men’s and women’s sports if men and women can play on either?

What is the point?

 

[Emily Lake]

Yeah, I understood the point you were attempting to make.

But if you’re going to claim that sex exists on a spectrum akin to light, you’re going to have to do a lot more explaining of what you’re measuring on this “sex spectrum”.

That things exist that are on a spectrum, is not enough to establish sex exists on a spectrum.

I'm simply showing you didn't show it's not a spectrum.

The reality is that there are enough pieces to most observed things in biology that most things are a spectrum. It can be very diffuse (skin color), it can have very sharp peaks, but there will still be some examples over a range.

Yes, it's true that most things in biology are on a spectrum. For example, a typical thing in biology is whether an animal is a chordate or an arthropod*. And that is a spectrum, like anything else. There are roughly six times ten to the twenty-third animals on that spectrum, intermediate between chordate and arthropod, give or take a few orders of magnitude. The thing is, though, that those intermediate animals are all dead. Every last one died in the Precambrian era and only a few of their fossils remain.

(* Of course many animals are neither chordate nor arthropod nor anything in between, but are something else entirely, such as jellyfish. Those animals just aren't the ones we're talking about.)

Likewise, yes, of course sex is a spectrum, like anything else. We sexually dimorphic beings evolved from some ancestral sexless meiotically reproducing species in which any haploid gamete could fertilize any other haploid gamete. Sex evolved gradually as a result of an enormous game of multi-player Prisoner's Dilemma. Cooperators gave their offspring a head-start by donating a little more food to their gametes. This made it possible for the Defector strategy to take hold, organisms giving their offspring a head-start by donating a little less food to their gametes, counting on that to make their gametes faster and counting on some hapless Cooperator to have made up the food deficit for them. Eventually the Defector and Cooperator strategies came to dominate numerically, so the chance that a proto-egg would encounter another proto-egg (or encounter a sperg playing some third strategy) before some proto-sperm got to it first went down and down to the point where random genetic drift could strip proto-eggs of their ability to fertilize one another. Meanwhile proto-sperms were fertilizing one another with wild abandon but since both parents had defected the resulting embryo started life with too little food to be viable, so the proto-sperms were actively selected for evolving avoidance mechanisms, so they too stopped being able to fertilize one another. Thus originated sexes.

So the challenge to you is not to argue for why sex is a spectrum. The challenge is to give a reason to think any of the organisms at intermediate points on that spectrum are still alive. They could have all died in the Precambrian.

Add to that... the origination of sexes is over a billion years old, and well-established anisogamy in vertebrates is hundreds of millions of years old, pre-cambrian.

Interestingly, some vertebrates have subsequently evolved parthenogenesis or monosagamy after being anisogamous. To the best of our knowledge, this has been the result of one of the sexes becoming extinct due to any number of reasons. There's a fish (I forget where), that is parthenogenetic now, but which was anisogamous within recorded history. Something happened that affected the males, but not the females, and dramatically reduced the number of males available for reproduction. So the females ended up evolving the ability to essentially clone themselves... but here's the kicker: In order to prompt that process, they have to spawn with males of a closely related species. They still have to go through the steps of sexual reproduction, and they need the presence of sperm in order for cell division to begin. But hey don't actually *use* any of those sperm. It's a weird situation, because apparently the fact that these cloning-fish are hijacking males from a closely related species is putting additional pressure on the sexually reproductive species, by reducing the number of viable offspring produced. A bunch of viable sperm are being wasted on eggs that don't use them, and the eggs that need them aren't getting enough.