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

[Loren Pechtel]

Here’s the thing you are not considering: Survivors of sexual assault and rape often experience some degree of PTSD as a result of the trauma of the assault.

The fact that you and other men in this thread are discounting the effects of PTSD and the severity of those effects does not help you make your case or make you seem to be the rational person I am certain you consider yourself. Instead, it’s just one more instance of men not actually giving a shit about women or their concerns because you, personally, are not concerned by the same things.

Which is going to be triggered by male-presenting vagina-bearers.

Nope. Women and girls walk around all the time among all sorts of males or male appearing persons.

What is potentially traumatic is the appearance of an actual exposed penis in what is supposed to be female only space. Because the assumption is that a person exposing their penis in a female only space is there for nefarious reasons

Loren, you have no idea what you are talking about and your posts just make you seem not just ignorant but malicious.

You don't expect to see a male face there, either. Why is that not triggering?

 

[Toni]

Here’s the thing you are not considering: Survivors of sexual assault and rape often experience some degree of PTSD as a result of the trauma of the assault.

The fact that you and other men in this thread are discounting the effects of PTSD and the severity of those effects does not help you make your case or make you seem to be the rational person I am certain you consider yourself. Instead, it’s just one more instance of men not actually giving a shit about women or their concerns because you, personally, are not concerned by the same things.

Which is going to be triggered by male-presenting vagina-bearers.

Is it more important for you to think you scored a point in a riposte, or to have a frank conversation?

What is important to Loren is that he is right. Even when he is wrong.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Very few. Push it to the edge--that 10? year old girl in the midwest, I'm not recalling the details but it made national news. How many would expect their daughter to carry in that situation?

No, Loren, there are approximately 52 Million adult Catholics in the US. Many, but not all, consider abortion to be murder. Some portion will accept an exception in the case of rape. Many evangelicals also see abortion as murder. Some portion will see an exception in the case of rape as valid. Some people who oppose abortion in general make exceptions when the life of the mother is at risk but not all do. Most Lutherans oppose abortion and see it as murder. The list goes on.

Yes, there are a lot of devout people who would make an exception for a child who became pregnant or if it was them/their daughter/mother/sister/wife whose pregnancy was the result of rape or of their life was at risk. But plenty of little girls get married off to grown men who impregnated them to cover up the sin.

A very large percentage will accept exceptions in case of rape.

But if you make an exception for rape you're saying it's not really murder. Otherwise, why would the law not also permit someone to kill their rapist?

 

[Toni]

Here’s the thing you are not considering: Survivors of sexual assault and rape often experience some degree of PTSD as a result of the trauma of the assault.

The fact that you and other men in this thread are discounting the effects of PTSD and the severity of those effects does not help you make your case or make you seem to be the rational person I am certain you consider yourself. Instead, it’s just one more instance of men not actually giving a shit about women or their concerns because you, personally, are not concerned by the same things.

Which is going to be triggered by male-presenting vagina-bearers.

Nope. Women and girls walk around all the time among all sorts of males or male appearing persons.

What is potentially traumatic is the appearance of an actual exposed penis in what is supposed to be female only space. Because the assumption is that a person exposing their penis in a female only space is there for nefarious reasons

Loren, you have no idea what you are talking about and your posts just make you seem not just ignorant but malicious.

You don't expect to see a male face there, either. Why is that not triggering?

Still seems like you are getting off on this discussion. Unfortunately I am not allowed to put you on ignore because you are a mod. But I do not think your participation in this thread is in good faith.

 

[Emily Lake]

I think social expectations either change or they don’t. Either people become more accepting and less fearful of trans or they don’t. Laws may change the speed at which expectations alter. If the laws are successful, the expectations change faster and wider. If not, the change moves in the opposite direction.

Personally, I think most of society was already pretty accepting of transgender people socially. Some idiots here and there, just like there are still some idiots who demand that gay people are sinners. But the majority of people Gen-X and younger do not care how people present. If a man shows up in a dress, and it looks good on him, cool. If he has long hair and wears make-up, well we grew up with hair bands - this is not new or shocking, and nobody gave a crap.

Part of the problem with this is that society didn't get a chance to hash it out. In several parts of the country, policies were put in place that FORCED us to accept males in female-specific intimate spaces. There has been a lot of push back to those policies - because those policies harm women and grant special privileges to men. There are several policies that got put in place without the governing bodies ever even soliciting feedback from women.

Some of the most egregious (yet under-discussed) are around prison housing. There are several states (WA and CA definitely, but some others I can't recall as well) that just decided that males in the male prison who declare themselves to be "women" are eligible to be housed in female prisons, regardless of whether those males still have all their bits, and regardless of what they're in prison for.

Sports has garnered the most attention, because so many more people see it directly. You end up with Laurel Hubbard competing in the Olympics against women, and everyone with sense recognizes that it's very unfair to the female competitors. Every parent who sees a teenaged male who has a transgender identity beat the socks off their daughter in a track event immediately recognizes it as unjust.

The in-betweens largely fall into intimate spaces and services. Those often get overlooked or hand-waved away by men in general, and frequently get ignored by women who don't use those spaces.

But all of them are situations where a change was forced on women, without consent, without discussion. And as you note, there's backlash. We really shouldn't have to have laws about who gets to use which bathroom - and we wouldn't have if someone hadn't made a law that said bepenised people who say a magic phrase are allowed to get their dicks out in the women's side of the nude spa.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Which is going to be triggered by male-presenting vagina-bearers.

Nope. Women and girls walk around all the time among all sorts of males or male appearing persons.

What is potentially traumatic is the appearance of an actual exposed penis in what is supposed to be female only space. Because the assumption is that a person exposing their penis in a female only space is there for nefarious reasons

Loren, you have no idea what you are talking about and your posts just make you seem not just ignorant but malicious.

You don't expect to see a male face there, either. Why is that not triggering?

Are you seriously questioning the veracity of the claim that a bottom half naked, what appears to be, male in a women's locker room can be interpreted as a potential threat by a woman? Toni is saying the sky is blue... and you are responding, 'what if it is cloudy?'

A male can be in a woman's locker room for a few reasons, mistake/wrong door, staff, attending to something that needs attending. A bottom half naked 'male'... no. One catches attention, one causes an alarm.

 

[Toni]

Which is going to be triggered by male-presenting vagina-bearers.

Nope. Women and girls walk around all the time among all sorts of males or male appearing persons.

What is potentially traumatic is the appearance of an actual exposed penis in what is supposed to be female only space. Because the assumption is that a person exposing their penis in a female only space is there for nefarious reasons

Loren, you have no idea what you are talking about and your posts just make you seem not just ignorant but malicious.

You don't expect to see a male face there, either. Why is that not triggering?

Are you seriously questioning the veracity of the claim that a bottom half naked, what appears to be, male in a women's locker room can be interpreted as a potential threat by a woman? Toni is saying the sky is blue... and you are responding, 'what if it is cloudy?'

A male can be in a woman's locker room for a few reasons, mistake/wrong door, staff, attending to something that needs attending. A bottom half naked 'male'... no. One catches attention, one causes an alarm.

He only cares about being right or winning. For him the stakes are low, so it’s just one long giant troll.

 

[Jarhyn]

someone just wearing female clothing to gain access to victims IS an actual threat.

And so are giant meteors, and volcanic eruptions in otherwise geologically stable areas, and insane undead psycho killers in hockey masks, were any of those things to exist in that place and time.

What these all have in common is that they don't exist in appreciable quantities, or at all really, for some of them, and you should be more worried, statistically, about being accosted by a radfem.

 

[Emily Lake]

What would be factually accurate would be to say that Semenya is a male with a disorder of sexual development that resulted in ambiguous or misleading genitals being recorded at birth.

So you think it's more accurate to say she's a male with a DSD that resulted in female appearance at birth, which led to female legal status and female upbringing. Whether that is why she has a female self identity is unknown/unknowable. Either way, it's her intersex traits at the heart of her legal case.

Is Semenya's XY chromosome pairing the definitive trait that makes her a male? Heather Heyer has the XY genotype and you said she's female since she was able to give birth.

You appear to have answered your own question.

I have my own opinion but Emily Lake rejects "intersex" as a valid category. She has stated her opinion that Heather Heyer is female and Castor Semenya is male despite both of them having the XY karyotype, apparently because Heyer grew a uterus while Semenya's vagina doesn't lead to one (that we know of).

She has not said whether she considers the person referenced earlier in this thread who had a penis, testis, and fully formed uterus with attached fallopian tube to be male, although I presume she does considering his proven ability to father children.

Perhaps you could consider reading a bit more, and assuming a bit less? I'm getting tired of having to repeat myself over and over, since the true believers like to swap out piles of straw.

Sex in humans (and mammals and birds and every anisogamous species on the planet) is defined by the type of reproductive system that an individual has. In every anisogamous species, there is one reproductive system that evolved to support the production of large gametes, and a different reproductive system that evolved to support the production of small gametes.

Actual production of gametes is not required. What matters is the type of reproductive system the individual has.

Some very few people have disorders of sexual development that result in their reproductive systems not developing as expected for normal humans. The majority of people with DSDs are phenotypically normal - they have an entire male reproductive system, or an entire female reproductive system, with no aberrations or anomalies. Those people, the majority, have DSDs that express with complications either at puberty or when they try to have kids and find that they're sterile or that their fertility is negatively affected. A small minority of people with DSDs have conditions that can occur with ambiguous external genitals. The most common of those is 5-ARD, which can result in "girl-ish" looking genitals at birth - in third world countries where nobody bothers to look closer, these individuals are sometimes recorded as second-class citizens because they're not "male enough" to be counted among the real men. At puberty, however, those males with 5-ARD will experience a normal male puberty and their bodies will change along male development patterns.

The term "intersex" is a misnomer - and it's a term that is fairly heavily objected to by people who actually have DSDs. People who actually have DSDs object, because it gives the entirely false perception that they're somehow a different sex than male or female, and they aren't. Their treatment modalities are completely dependent upon them being male or female, and the disorders themselves diverge by sex. Almost every single DSD out there is explicitly a male disorder or a female disorder. Ovotesticular disorder is one of the only ones that can occur in either sex, and can be challenging for doctors to figure out shich sex the individual is - it frequently occurs as a result of mosaicism.

At the end of the day, the people who most ardently hang on to the term "intersex" are activists and advocates on behalf of people with transgender identities. The overwhelming majority of people with transgender identities do NOT have DSDs of any sort, and certainly don't have ambiguous genitals. Rather, they latch on the term because they can abuse someone else's medical condition in order to further their ideology by pretending that sex in humans is a spectrum.

Yes, I reject "intersex" as a valid sex category, because it isn't a valid sex category.

 

[Emily Lake]

If it's not concocted why do we keep seeing poor evidence being trumpeted? Why do we not see any good evidence? Why did this suddenly show up when the reich wing needed a bogeyman?

There is plenty of evidence... but you continue to reject it out of hand, or you hand-wave it away as "not a big deal" because it doesn't impact men.

And it didn't suddenly show up - it's been under discussion for well over a decade. You only started paying attention when the right wing grabbed on to it. When it was predominantly women complaining about it, you didn't notice.

And seriously, if Dems are so idiotic as to continue pushing policies that place fully intact males in female prisons on the basis of their magic words, continue to push policies that let middle-school boys hang out in the girl's showers and look at boobies as long as they say their name is "Cloud" and they go by "she/her pronouns", as long as they continue to support male-bodied people competing in women's sports and displacing women from their own competitions... As long as Dems continue to DEMAND that transwomen are really actually totally real women...

Well, you're just handing that to Repubs on a silver platter, complete with garnish. Of course they're going to shine a light on it so that everyone can see how insane it is.

 

[Emily Lake]

Semenya has male sex traits. She also has female sex traits. Her gender is female.

Semenya has ALL of the male sex traits, and has one single vestigial female sex trait only because his vaginal pouch didn't completely dissolve during fetal development.

I don't care what Semenya's "gender identity" is, especially not when it comes to him competing in women's athletic competitions. Semenya is a male of the human species, how he feels about his own body has no bearing on his increased muscle mass, bone density, lung and heat capacity, skeletal structure, and performance.

Nor does it apparently have any bearing on his ability to father children with his wife.

 

[Toni]

someone just wearing female clothing to gain access to victims IS an actual threat.

And so are giant meteors, and volcanic eruptions in otherwise geologically stable areas, and insane undead psycho killers in hockey masks, were any of those things to exist in that place and time.

What these all have in common is that they don't exist in appreciable quantities, or at all really, for some of them, and you should be more worried, statistically, about being accosted by a radfem.

Exactly: it’s a very rare occurrence and yet more than one such instance has been linked in this thread.

But those very few cases further cause fear and anxiety among the survivors of sexual assault.

I would like to point out that I have repeatedly said that the opportunities for trauma are not just for cis girls and women but also for trans girls and women. Who have a higher instance of sexual assault. But who could be very traumatized by reactions of those not expecting to see male bodies in their female only spaces.

 

[Emily Lake]

What about Emily imposing her belief about Semenya's gender on everybody else, including Semenya?

Why do you think that a male should have the right to force me to abandon the clear and accurate use of English? Semenya can have whatever the hell gender he wants to - I perceive him as male, he is incontrovertibly male, therefore I feel no shame using male pronouns in reference to him.

If he has a problem with that, he's free to sign up for membership on IIDB and request that I refer to him differently. Until then, I'm not about to be bullied into surrendering clarity in favor of the feelings of someone who isn't even here.

 

[Emily Lake]

Emily Lake can think what she likes. She and I agree on a lot of things, and she has very good information on the biological aspects of sex and sexual development. But she's very rigid when it comes to gender, and I believe she's pretty conservative about gender norms.

I'm very 'rigid' in that I give exactly zero shits about gender at all, and I think all gender norms should be smashed into smithereens and shot into the sun. On the other hand, I give a lot of shits about sex in some very specific instances where sex actually matters.

How you get around to thinking that's "conservative" is a mystery to me.

 

[Emily Lake]

And many of us do not agree with that position. You would be in a male body, that wouldn't make your mind male.

There is no "male mind". We don't have pink or blue brains. There are sex-based difference in our brains that are directly related to the sexed development processes we go through as fetuses. There are differences in some parts of the brain as they are influenced by hormones. But there is no fucking "male mind".

Like I said, I'd be very confused, and probably behaviorally unusual, but I would be in a body that is incontrovertibly male... therefore I would be a man.

 

[Jarhyn]

someone just wearing female clothing to gain access to victims IS an actual threat.

And so are giant meteors, and volcanic eruptions in otherwise geologically stable areas, and insane undead psycho killers in hockey masks, were any of those things to exist in that place and time.

What these all have in common is that they don't exist in appreciable quantities, or at all really, for some of them, and you should be more worried, statistically, about being accosted by a radfem.

Exactly: it’s a very rare occurrence and yet more than one such instance has been linked in this thread.

But those very few cases further cause fear and anxiety among the survivors of sexual assault.

I would like to point out that I have repeatedly said that the opportunities for trauma are not just for cis girls and women but also for trans girls and women. Who have a higher instance of sexual assault. But who could be very traumatized by reactions of those not expecting to see make bodies in their female only spaces.

And I would say all this indicates is that the people emphasizing that trans people are more of a danger than, say, CIS women are traumatizing women with phantoms. They are not allies. They are not friends. They should be shouted down off of their soapboxes and told to peddle their paranoia nowhere.

(Just as has been done with those shrieking "reefer madness").

 

[Emily Lake]

Ah, you're referencing the issue of forced normativity, of calling conditions "disorders"

This is absurd. Trying to pretend that actual deleterious conditions are just some magical variation and all good prevents people from getting the medical care they need.

FFS, my uterine fibroids were a condition that could have killed me. My epilepsy is 100% a disorder and I'm glad that it's recognized as such - that's how I get appropriate treatment to keep it well managed!

and villifying people through this purity impulse.

The vilification is occurring only inside your head, buddy.

 

[laughing dog]

I'm all for science, and I'm all for the college system. And I don't despise academia... although I frequently dislike academics. I particularly dislike those academics who insist that their liberal arts studies full of untestable speculations are synonymous with hard sciences.

You sound very much like I used to be: assuming that social sciences had no real science to them, which, as it turns out, is quite false. Which I learned in college and after. Sure intro classes were very easy but so were intro science and math courses.

You didn't understand her point.

Yes, there is merit to the social sciences. But they are full of untestable stuff that has no business being called science. Real science needs either high precision observations or a whole lot of observations, and the social sciences have a very hard time actually doing this.

Have the strings of string theory been measured?

I don’t think any thinks Isaac Newton didn’t do physics, but neither did he have high precision nor lots of observations.

 

[Emily Lake]

I'm all for science, and I'm all for the college system. And I don't despise academia... although I frequently dislike academics. I particularly dislike those academics who insist that their liberal arts studies full of untestable speculations are synonymous with hard sciences.

You sound very much like I used to be: assuming that social sciences had no real science to them, which, as it turns out, is quite false. Which I learned in college and after. Sure intro classes were very easy but so were intro science and math courses.

You didn't understand her point.

Yes, there is merit to the social sciences. But they are full of untestable stuff that has no business being called science. Real science needs either high precision observations or a whole lot of observations, and the social sciences have a very hard time actually doing this.

Hard sciences need to be quantifiable, testable, and falsifiable.

There are a whole lot of fields of study that have managed to get the label "science" slapped on them, even though they aren't science at all. There are lots of things, like the social sciences, that have somehow acquired a label of science but are almost entirely qualitative, with some occasional categorical statistics involved. Which is great - often quite worthwhile - but not actually science.

There's also a bit of a gray area, in applied sciences. Those are studies that are built on actual real science, but the majority of people who work in those fields don't do any actual science. I'd put myself in that category, as an actuary. Schools that offer degree in my field usually call it "actuarial science" but there's no actual science going on, it's all application of stuff that someone else did the real science for. I'd put computer science in the same category, along with most of medicine.

 

[Emily Lake]

The question is how. I don’t know the answer but having men tell girls and women to just get over it—when what women and girls are afraid of is violence at the hands of men! is more than a little rich.

The problem is that fear is not the same thing as risk.

We see no good evidence of actual risk.

"Don't worry ladies, you don't actually have any risk of sexual assault or harassment, it's all in your heads. What? Oh no, those statistics are totally just made up by the right wing."