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

[Emily Lake]

We aren't going to properly and humanely settle this issue without making two things clear, transgender people exist, transgender people are human beings. Once we can accept that as a culture, we can then provide them the medical support they need to be able to help determine and accept who they really are. Once we get there, we can cut this noise about danger because ultimately, the fear is caused by one simple thing, doubting who these people say they are.

The objective is to remove them from society.

Bullshit. The objective is to remove males from female intimate spaces and sports, nothing more.

 

[Emily Lake]

But there are people in this thread that want to pretend transgenderism is a choice.

Some is not a choice, and is likely to have a neurological basis (unclear whether it's congenital or acquired). Some is a paraphilia. Some is a misplaced fixation driven by autism. Some is a coping mechanism for trauma related to their sexed body. And some is simply exploitation of a gigantic gaping loophole that lets males be in the presence of non-consenting naked females with no consequences.

If we had any remotely reasonable way to tell these apart, it would be an entirely different discussion, and there would be many options for how best to address those few with a neurological basis.

The problem is you still haven't demonstrated someone who will go to the DMV to get the "F" license for the purpose of exploitation.

Darren Merager.

History of FELONY sexual offenses, including multuple cases of indecent exposure and flashing. Changed *HIS* sex marker to "F", which required no background check, no medical diagnoses, nothing other than him showing up and asking for a new ID.

Consequently, the fact that his ID now says "F" led to him being found not guilty of indecent exposure, because he was only doing what every other women in a nude spa was doing - airing out his dick and balls.

 

[Emily Lake]

This is made worse by the fact that *some* people who assert to be transwomen are doing so as a means of feeding a paraphilia using women as live action props in their sexual role play. Even if it's not many, they do exist, and that's a problem.

There are a lot more lesbians than trans.

Loren, do you think that homosexuality is a paraphilia?

 

[Emily Lake]

Seriously, men in this thread are absolutely discounting fears and concerns of women.

And they are right to do so.

People should discount fears and concerns, in the absence of evidence that those fears are based on actual threats.

$*&(^#@*(*&(^*^%#*&

1 in 5 women in the US has been subjected to an attempted or completed rape - including both me and Toni.
80% of women in the US have been sexually assaulted - and that doesn't include the ones who don't count having their boob grabbed by a total stranger as a sexual assault, and see it as just the cost of being a woman.
90% of the victims of sexual assault are female, and 98% of the perpetrators are male.

But sure. Go ahead and mansplain to us silly old hens that our concerns and fears are irrational.

*)%^$&^^%@!$

 

[Emily Lake]

Which, btw, happens all the time. Men, it seems, are programmed to stand up for men, including ‘men’ who transition into women. I’m assuming that’s what is going on here.

That may be the most bat-shit insane thing that's been written in this thread. No, men do not "stand up" for trans women, they rape them and then they kill them. That is what happens to trans women, and by forcing trans women to either use the men's room and risk getting raped and assaulted there, or risk breaking the law by using the women's, and thus risk getting sent to a men's prison where they will most certainly be raped or assaulted, you are helping their abusers gain and keep access to them. You may see yourself as defending the rights of cis women, but you are not taking an anti-rape position, here. Not by a long shot.

Just for consideration... What portion of those victims are MALES who have a transgender identity, as opposed to FEMALES? And how many of them are people who experienced sexual victimization BEFORE they began to identify as trans?

Those are things that these sorts of studies consistently conflate. I have yet to see one that breaks transgender victims out by their actual sex and compares the rate of victimization of transgender identified males to the rate for transgender identified females. And I have never yet seen one that bothered to ask when the victimization occurred, and to control for victimization that happened prior to the development of their transgender identity. Yet we have seen countless bits of research and discussion about the fact that a rather large portion of the young female humans who begin identifying as transmen at the onset of puberty were prior victims of sexual violence, and are very likely fleeing from their sexed bodies as a coping mechanism.

 

[Emily Lake]

Yes, I know. Men rape and kill women. That fact is reinforced daily in news accounts. That, exactly, is what some of the female responders in this thread are concerned about. Violence at the hands of men.

Then why did you write that men "instinctively" defend trans women, in blatant denial of any sort of reality, and therefore the very real suffering of those targeted by anti-trans propaganda? It gives the impression that you want to control where the camera points, to have everyone focus only on the things you are concerned about. But these policies affect more than just you, so you cannot be the only cameraman.

Sometimes your seeming inability to understand context baffles me.

Men defend the right of transgender identified men to use female single-sex spaces. Duh. That was extremely apparent from context.

 

[Emily Lake]

As a child, about 9 or 10, I had an experience that has stuck with me in a really visceral way. This would have been in the eighties. I was with my bio-dad for the summer, and one of his friends was hanging out. He had on extremely short shorts, the kind that were a bit loose around the thighs, late 70s to early 80s style running shorts. I was sitting on the floor playing with my 1-year old brother, and this guy was sitting across from me with his legs spread, and his penis visible. He kept looking at me and bobbing his penis. This guy was getting sexually aroused from showing his penis to me as a very young child.

I wasn't raised to think that nudity was shameful. Up until about 5, I would take group showers after being at the beach with my parents. We weren't nudists, but I was raised to think that nudity was natural and nothing to be ashamed of, but also to be respectful because nudity isn't always appropriate.

But you aren't describing a situation where nudity is the problem. Rather, sexual actions directed at a child. Very, very wrong.

Even though I didn't, and still don't think that nudity is shameful, I do think that nudity can present a risk... and that risk is greater for women than it is for men. That experience was intensely creepy at the time, even though I didn't completely understand why it was so creepy and intimidating. It's stuck with me my entire life.

Does that qualify as a "thing-breaking-edge-case" for you when it comes to views on whether or not mixed-sex nudity in some limited situations is a bad idea?

You're blaming nudity when that's not the cause.

Are you quite certain? Do you think that this man would hesitate one little bit if he were legally allowed by right to go into a YMCA women's locker room when there were young girls present... if the only thing he had to do was say "I go by she/her pronouns"? Are you under the impression that if he were in a place where nudity was allowable and commonplace, he would NOT engage in such sexual activity toward a child?

 

[Emily Lake]

Before we start splitting hairs over the differences between a pseudovagina, a vaginal pouch, a blind vagina, and a vagina that does not terminate in a cervix, perhaps we should first discuss whether someone who has what appears to be a vagina, functions like a vagina during non-reproductive penis-in-vagina sex, and naturally developed in the place where vaginas grow, can say they have a vagina? Then we can move on to listing what it is about her vagina that posters here think excludes her from the "has a vagina" category.

And then we'll talk about the women in my family who've had hysterectomies and now have "blind vaginas", "vaginal pouches", etc.

Blind vagina and vaginal pouch, vagina that doesn't terminate in a cervix all mean more or less the same thing. "Vaginal pouch" tends to more often refer to male infants whose mullerian features didn't completely dissolve during development, and are born with something that looks like a vaginal opening on cursory examination. In males with 5-ARD, that pouch is incompletely developed and will remain shallow. It doesn't get larger during puberty as it would in a female. In many cases, it atrophies and closes during puberty because testosterone does horrific things to vaginas.

 

[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 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").

I haven’t been clear: I do not think trans women are actually a threat to people in female only spaces.

I DO think there is potential for trauma/triggering of PTSD for victims of sexual assault and also for trans women/girls who are screamed at or otherwise have individuals react in fear.

My initial reaction to a naked male appearing body if I were showering in the women’s locker room at the gym would be to assume a threat. Most women would assume a threat. Most girls would assume a threat.

This is an instinctive reaction in part but also a conditioned reaction. In most places in the US, showers facilities are separated by gender and sex and for most people gender and sex are congruent.

If I were to walk into a male only shower and encounter 20 naked men, I’d be startled and embarrassed by my mistake but not afraid of being assaulted. One expects to encounter exposed penises in men’s showers.

Very few rattle snakes will bite anyone unless disturbed or startled. That does not reduce the fear of rattle snakes if one should happen to encounter one in the shower. Not to be overly Freudian here. I’m guessing most males would experience fear if they encountered a rattle snake in the shower, much more so than if they encountered one in a zoo exhibit or say, at some distance on a hiking trail.

 

[Emily Lake]

Emily Lake posts in declarative statements all the time. She tells us what she thinks, which is fine, but she also tries to tell us what _to_ think, which can be inflammatory.

I provide accurate information.

And she can be very intolerant of people who disagree with her assessments. She has been deliberately calling Semenya "he" even though she knows Semenya was raised as a girl, accepted herself as a girl, and now lives as a woman.

I don't give a good goddamn about anybody's gender identity. I accept that some people have a mental condition that causes them distress about their sexed bodies, and I even accept that in some few cases it might be a congenital condition. But I think the entire notion of gender identity is bullshit - it's adopting regressive social stereotypes as a badge of honor.

So I don't care how Semenya was raised, I don't care how he feels about himself. I do care that Semenya is a male, with a disorder that only males can have. I don't care if you're third-hand offended on behalf of a man you've never met, it's irrelevant.

Although... "lives as a woman" is an interesting take. Semenya consistently wears male clothing, no make up, none of the trappings of a female in his society. He's married to a woman, and he has fathered a kid. So I'm not sure what you think "lives as a woman" constitutes, aside from him saying that he thinks he should have the special privilege of competing against women in sports.

I feel bad for the media attention he received... same as I feel had for the media attention Khelif received. But it's limited sympathy in both cases. Neither of them should be harassed for their conditions. But on the other hand they're both males and I'm pretty damned sure that both of them know they're males, as do all of their coaches and entourage. I don't feel compelled to pretend to sympathy for a cheater.

Sure, Semenya isn't a typical woman. But she has a vagina, a body part that is widely considered to be the defining characteristic of a woman. And it's a body part that a lot of women have gotten a lot of belittling, demeaning shit about having for most, if not all, of our lives.

I feel like a vagina is only considered the defining characteristic of a woman in the eyes of men. I'm rather inclined to think that most women consider women to be more than just a receptacle for a penis

 

[Emily Lake]

The one who raged at me for mansplaining things because I disagreed with her until I let her know I'm a woman. Then it was okay for me to have an opinion, I guess.

Meh... that's a risk. If it makes you feel any better, I've raged at Toni on a few occasions too.

 

[Toni]

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.

Really? You don’t think economists or sociologists or psychologists conduct research or collect and analyze data?

 

[Arctish]

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.

You keep repeating yourself because you keep revisiting your basic premise and spelling out your argument. I do that, too, usually in the Israel/Palestine threads when people ignore history and facts. The difference I see happening here is that there are two separate things, sex and gender, under discussion. Posters here accept the facts you present about sex and sexual development, but you don't appear to accept facts about identity and gender.

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.

Yes, there are two sexes in humans, male and female.

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.

Every time I look into who is ardently advocating for "intersex" being recognized as a valid category, I find people like Dana Zzyym, who fought for years to have the reality of their intersex status recognized and respected so that kids born with intersex conditions don't have to endure the pain and suffering they did when doctors try to "fix" them.

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.

Biology isn't all neat and tidy. Ongoing evolution produces variations, mutations, sports, and quirks all the time. Even when DNA is identical, conditions under which a child developed can lead to different end results.

"Intersex" is a term that describes people who don't meet all the criteria for one of the two sex categories, or who have physical characteristics of both. It is the catch-all term for the end result of a lot of different developmental pathways that lead to one having ambiguous genitalia or sex organs of more than one sex. It doesn't have to be precisely defined for it to be an accurate, useful, and valid designation.

Even if we only recognize two sexes and sort everyone into one or the other, that does not mean there are only two genders, or that gender is immutable.

 

[Emily Lake]

True, but I doubt bilby falls into that category. I think what we have here is a failure to communicate, with many positions from differing agendas or motives.

• transgenderism is a choice, so who cares about what they "want"
• perfect world, black and white view on morality and that people who honestly feel of a certain gender naturally have a right to such privileges of said gender
• need to balance the rights of cis-women and transgenders
• privileges for cis-women are in a lock box and no one else should have access

Some people may even come out on the same generalized position, but for different reasons.

See, I would list that out very differently

• Gender identity is not sex, sex is immutable and sometimes sex matters
• Need to balance social protections for transgender identified people against needs of female human beings, including the right of consent and the right of privacy from the opposite sex
• Advocate for males of the human species to stop being assholes to males who don't conform to some regressive notion of "real men" and stop attacking males who present as female

 

[Emily Lake]

Not to mention that a LOT of women direct sexual actions at children.

Nobody has said otherwise. That said... over 90% perpetrators of sexual offenses against children are human males.

Hate to break it to you (and apparently others in this thread), but turns out men are the ones doing the overwhelming majority of the raping and sexual assaulting of other people. Seems reasonable that we allow for some safeguards for those groups of people who are their victims, in an effort to prevent those harms from occurring.

 

[Emily Lake]

The problem was she didn't want to be visible in the men's room with a vagina. I don't blame her.

So why do you think that vagina-havers should be required to be visible to penis-havers in the women's room?

 

[Emily Lake]

It's much more likely you'll play a role in some lesbian's sexual object than some trans person's sexual object.

Are you under the impression that lesbians display male patterns of sexual ideation and focus?

 

[Emily Lake]

it is the responsibility of even those who have been traumatized to find treatment for their issues

How do you feel about the director of a women's rape shelter telling female rape victims that they should "reframe their trauma" so that males can sit in on their deeply personal therapy sessions where they go through what happened to them in detail?

 

[Emily Lake]

Some people very sincerely oppose abortion rights because they truly believe that abortion is murder.

Very, very few.

See how they feel about rape of a child. Should the child be forced to carry? If it's murder, then the answer is yes.

But note the witch hunting. Sacrificing women over the word "abortion", regardless of whether there's actually a viable pregnancy. And sacrificing women when they are under a very real threat that in other contexts would get ruled justifiable homicide. And we get things like this:

Republican representative’s ectopic pregnancy clashes with Florida abortion law

Kat Cammack blames left’s fearmongering after medical staff hesitated to give her drugs needed to end pregnancy

www.theguardian.com

No, idiot, you had an abortion. And she blames the left for creating the climate of fear that put her life in danger. No, the left simply pointed out the climate of fear the recih has created.

Over the years I have managed to get most such supposed "pro-life" people to admit it's about punishment. And the very, very few that I considered truly pro-life looked at it as an unfortunate situation for the woman and felt sorry that she had to go through it.

No, not very few. Many Catholics, for example believe that abortion is murder. There are a lot of Catholics in the world.

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.

Add Mormons, a large portion of Jews, and Muslims. And that's only the groups that consider abortion at any stage to be murder. There are also a lot of people who view non-medically-necessitated terminations late in the pregnancy as being murder. Something like 90% of the nation supports RvW gestational limits.

 

[Emily Lake]

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?

It's concerning. It's not necessarily intimidating or triggering.

Seeing a random johnson without consent is pretty intimidating and triggering to most women.