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

[Loren Pechtel]

Clearly we are not communicating well.

We can measure someone's height. We can't measure their gender even though we can observe that most people have one.

How the heck do you figure we can observe they have one but can't measure what it is?!? That's like saying we can observe the sky has a color but can't measure it to be blue.

In any event, yes, of course we can measure their gender, the same as sociologists can measure class or anything else they study. When you wrote "She's got a vagina. ... If you asked 100 random guys if someone who has a vagina could ever be a man, and didn't reference DSDs or chromosomes, how many of them do you think would say "yes"?", that was you proposing a method to measure Semenya's gender.

We can measure the physical anatomy. We can't measure the brain.

I have a "relative" that is manic-depressive. We have no physical test that can detect manic-depressive so clearly there's no reason for her to be in a locked facility! (Suicide attempt.)

And, since you said the sky is blue: I was recently reading a bit about astronomical photography. In many cases the camera will record a very different color than the human eye sees. (Some common spectral lines are at points with a considerable discrepancy between how eyes and cameras see them and monitors aren't even capable of doing spectral lines.) Or just go outside wearing polarized sunglasses. Tip your head to the side. Which is the right "blue"?

In the first place, you're clearly as usual equivocating between gender identity and gender. If we ever really need to test someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender, well, ever since trial-by-ordeal was abolished 800 years ago courts of law have been evolving techniques for recognizing liars and they've mostly gotten pretty good at it, and if necessary FMRI and AI are showing promise at giving us better polygraphs; but that needn't concern us here since nobody is disputing Semenya's sense of self. For present purposes we can take your "having stated her gender very clearly" criterion as an adequate test of "someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender". What I disputed was Semenya's gender, not Semenya's sense of self when it comes to his/her gender. I am of course no no more of an authority on someone's gender than anyone else is; society as a whole is the only authority on social constructs. What makes me more of an expert on someone's gender than someone else is my willingness to pay attention, educate myself as to society's criteria, and apply them.

And why do you think there's lying involved? She grew up being female. She doesn't feel that growing a penis changed that.

Would it be okay for me to refer to you as "it", as in "I was trying to have a conversation with Bomb#20 and it kept missing the point"?

Free country. Poli used to have "All pronouns okay" under "Gender:"; that meant you had his permission to call him "it". What "It's a free country." means is you don't need my permission.

But I put "Yes". Thus you don't get to call me "it".

None of that is in dispute -- nobody is blaming Semenya for identifying as a woman. Half of us would no doubt do the same if we were born without penises and grew them at 12. But you keep taking for granted that Semenya's self-perception is relevant. If you want us to believe it's relevant, show your work.

Why shouldn't it be? We don't get to define how she sees herself.

Gender? I said "If you referenced DSDs and asked 100 random guys if someone who has a vagina and a penis and testes and a prostate and no ovaries and no fallopian tubes and no uterus and no cervix could ever be a man, how many of them do you think would say "yes"?", and you said "Again, I think there would be some confusion but I think nearly all would give a qualified "yes".". That was a gender evaluation.

Truth by poll??

Sex is relevant to gender but is not the final word on the matter. The final word is determined by society's criteria for categorizing people into genders. Sex is relevant because our society habitually uses sex as its main criterion. Self identity is irrelevant because our society habitually ignores self identity in its categorization criteria. In pre-women's-suffrage times, how many women were authorized to vote because they said they thought of themselves as men? In conscription times, how many men were exempted from the draft because they said they thought of themselves as women?

And gays weren't allowed to marry. Doesn't make the exclusion right.

Emily and seanie's contention that a "woman" is a "biologically female adult human", where "female" means having taken the Mullerian developmental pathway, is something they haven't adequately argued for; but neither have the trans-rights-activists here adequately argued against it. As a matter of logic, it is of course entirely possible that there is some rare DSD that creates adult Mullerian bodies that western civilization has been generally categorizing as male for the last 1500 years, or Wolffian female. If so, the people with that condition are respectively male men or female women. That is their gender; more than that, that is their sex, going by common usage. Biologists don't own the words "sex", "male" and "female" any more than trans-rights-activists own the words "men" and "women". If such a DSD exists, then biologists calling such a common-usage man "female", or such a common-usage woman "male", are using those terms as technical jargon. Biologists are of course perfectly entitled to make up and use any technical jargon they please; it doesn't make the rest of us wrong to stick to common usage. But then, as a matter of logic it's also entirely possible that there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter. So far nobody here has exhibited such a DSD.

The problem is that you are assuming all aspects of the person develop along the Mullerian or Wolffian pathways. In terms of physical anatomy any given part must be one or the other because all the anatomical changes are a transformation. That doesn't prove the mind works that way, though. Look at sexuality: does someone being attracted to women mean they can't be attracted to men? Of course not. Why should we assume gender is like the physical parts that transform and not like the mental parts that clearly can be both? The least surprising answer to me would be that a mental difference is more like sexuality (another mental difference) rather than anatomy (a physical difference.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If you drive out the MTFs you are allowing in the FTMs. So the women will see a "man".

FTMs are already allowed in, and nobody but you is proposing to change that, and your proposal to admit based on presentation suffers from it being a matter of subjective opinion how any given person presents, which makes using that as the criterion pretty impractical.

Upthread we have FTM arrested for being in the women's.

In considering a penis the objection was that the face scares. In considering the face the objection was the penis scares. One of those must be false.

Why on earth must one of those be false? A woman is apt to be scared by both male faces and penises in a ladies' room. They both indicate "man", they both indicate probable defeat if it comes to a physical contest, and they both indicate antisocial disrespect for female boundaries. Any woman who isn't a martial artist should probably be scared by both, unless the face comes with an obvious innocuous explanation for why she's seeing it, such as janitor equipment, or "I'm very sorry, my mistake." and a quick exit.

They were presented as this is what matters, not the other. We have A >> B and B >> A.

Or, as is typically the situation when you get a pile of bogus reasons, it's really about discrimination.

Of course it's about discrimination -- a ladies' room is a localized miniature affirmative action program. All affirmative action programs are about discrimination. That's no doubt enough to settle the issue for you, but the rest of us aren't single-issue voters on that topic. The fact that affirmative action is about discrimination is one con on a long list of pros and cons we all need to weigh on our personal scales. So don't tell us it's discrimination; tell us why we should care more about it being discrimination than about all the pros on our lists.

The Supreme Court has an awful lot of accumulated case law on discrimination. One of the principles it's evolved is the three levels of scrutiny: strict, intermediate, and rational basis. Approximately, strict scrutiny is for racial and religious discrimination; intermediate is for sex discrimination; rational basis is for everything else. A ladies' room discriminates against men, so you are basically claiming sex discrimination should get strict scrutiny. What justifies overturning all those precedents?

I have a problem with positions argued for false reasons. They should be able to stand on the truth.

 

[laughing dog]

In considering a penis the objection was that the face scares. In considering the face the objection was the penis scares. One of those must be false. Or, as is typically the situation when you get a pile of bogus reasons, it's really about discrimination.

No, it doesn't. People generally assume that a man has a penis. More than 99 percent of the time they would be right.

Which does not address my point.

I have seen claims that what's scary is the penis, not the face because the face could be a wrong room mistake or the like. No MTFs in the women's.

But now we also have the claim that it's the face even when the genitals are not visible. But that would mean no FTMs in the women's.

No, what you have seen is that the face means there is a penis which means a possible assault.

 

[Bomb#20]

Do you seriously expect us to take your word for it that the British people and the British courts can't figure out for themselves whether they like the consequences of having put gender ideologues in charge of policy unless they can find a cabal of Americans to pull their puppet strings for them? That's really not how the British think. ... Why the heck would a TERF be the least bit influenced by P2025 nuts? You do know what the RF in TERF stands for, don't you?

The thread title is about England but we are in America, I'm looking at what's happening here.

So your theory is what, that the British are fully capable of deciding all on their own that rule by progressive whackjobs is bad for them, but Americans would just love being ordered around by all our "self-congratulation as social policy" anointed ones if only a conspiracy of right-wingers hadn't told us we don't like it? You are proposing two explanations where one would serve. It's unparsimonious. You might as well tell us the ammonites and mosasaurs died out 65 million years ago because of an asteroid impact and coincidentally the tyrannosauruses died out at the same time because the mammals ate their eggs.

Have you read what P2025 says about the trans?

A bit. Looks pretty much like they licked their fingers to see which way the wind was blowing and endorsed it. I haven't seen them say anything about the trans that doesn't look like it would win in a national referendum.

And does it not occur to you that not everything is straightforward? The Nazis benefit from stirring up the TERFs, why do you think they wouldn't do a false flag operation??

Oh for the love of god! The Nazis aren't stirring up the TERFs. Why do you even think progressives keep calling gender critical people "TERFs", when most of us are nothing of the sort? It's because the TERFs were the first ones on top of this issue -- they saw it coming a mile off while the rest of us were caught napping! The P2025 folks got it from the so-called "TERFs", who got it from the actual TERFs, not the other way around. The progressives had tied themselves to a deeply unpopular cause, and eventually P2025 noticed the strategic error by their political extremist mirror images, so they took advantage of it.

Emily has even admitted the situation existed for a long time without a problem.

Methinks the situation you have in mind when you say "the situation" is not the same situation Emily agrees existed for a long time without a problem.

MTFs in the women's. It's been going on for a long time, in some countries for nearly 100 years.

That's a map-vs-territory fallacy -- the mere fact that you can choose to put the same label on two situations does not imply the two situations are the same. There are quite a few differences between what's going on now and what had been going on for 100 years without a problem, and the circumstance that you don't care about those differences doesn't magic them away. Emily has pointed some of those differences out and they're important to her.

What's changed is the reich wing stirring up hatred. They can't ship them off to the camps until they've sufficiently demonized them.

Oh please. Nobody is going to be shipped off to the camps for being trans. It's the people speaking out against gender ideology who are getting persecuted by the legal system. Hatred is being stirred up by the left wing with the hateful and insane policies they impose on a largely unwilling public.

Wake up!

We already are at the concentration camp stage. That prison in El Salvador.

And I see little difference between "deport to South Sudan" and "death camp". And I see little difference between Worm Brain's "solution" for psychiatric drugs and Auschwitz.

But being an illegal immigrant is illegal. Being trans is not illegal. Even if Worm Brain and Voldemort want to make it illegal, and even if they can get a compliant Congress to go along, they'll be up against the reasoning in Bostock -- a decision written by a Voldemort appointee.

 

[Bomb#20]

We can measure someone's height. We can't measure their gender even though we can observe that most people have one.

How the heck do you figure we can observe they have one but can't measure what it is?!? That's like saying we can observe the sky has a color but can't measure it to be blue.

In any event, yes, of course we can measure their gender, the same as sociologists can measure class or anything else they study. When you wrote "She's got a vagina. ... If you asked 100 random guys if someone who has a vagina could ever be a man, and didn't reference DSDs or chromosomes, how many of them do you think would say "yes"?", that was you proposing a method to measure Semenya's gender.

We can measure the physical anatomy. We can't measure the brain.

I have a "relative" that is manic-depressive. We have no physical test that can detect manic-depressive so clearly there's no reason for her to be in a locked facility! (Suicide attempt.)

You appear, just like every gender ideologue ever, to be equivocating between "gender" and "gender identity". They aren't interchangeable. Measuring the brain is relevant to gender identity, which like manic-depression is a matter of individual psychology. But gender is a social construct. What someone's gender is is therefore a sociology question, not a psychology question. So whether you can measure the brain impacts whether you can measure gender only if society's criteria for a gender include brain questions. Do you have any empirical evidence that society's criteria for a gender include brain questions?

In the first place, you're clearly as usual equivocating between gender identity and gender. If we ever really need to test someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender, well, ever since trial-by-ordeal was abolished 800 years ago courts of law have been evolving techniques for recognizing liars and they've mostly gotten pretty good at it, and if necessary FMRI and AI are showing promise at giving us better polygraphs; but that needn't concern us here since nobody is disputing Semenya's sense of self. For present purposes we can take your "having stated her gender very clearly" criterion as an adequate test of "someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender". What I disputed was Semenya's gender, not Semenya's sense of self when it comes to his/her gender. I am of course no no more of an authority on someone's gender than anyone else is; society as a whole is the only authority on social constructs. What makes me more of an expert on someone's gender than someone else is my willingness to pay attention, educate myself as to society's criteria, and apply them.

And why do you think there's lying involved? She grew up being female. She doesn't feel that growing a penis changed that.

Dude! You're replying on autopilot again. Turn off your autopilot and read for content, not keywords. I don't think there's lying involved! I just said "nobody is disputing Semenya's sense of self", remember? The lying part was a hypothetical! That's what the "If" means! I was only talking about lying in the first place because Arctish asked me "How do you propose we test someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender? What would make you more of an authority on someone's gender than they are?" That's asking me to consider a situation in which I wouldn't take someone's word for his or her sense of self. Well, that sounds like a situation where there's reason to suspect the person of lying. A rapist trying to get sent to a women's prison instead of a men's prison is an obvious example.

None of that is in dispute -- nobody is blaming Semenya for identifying as a woman. Half of us would no doubt do the same if we were born without penises and grew them at 12. But you keep taking for granted that Semenya's self-perception is relevant. If you want us to believe it's relevant, show your work.

Why shouldn't it be? We don't get to define how she sees herself.

That's a circular argument. You're simply assuming that "how she sees herself" is relevant, which is precisely the point in dispute.

Gender? I said "If you referenced DSDs and asked 100 random guys if someone who has a vagina and a penis and testes and a prostate and no ovaries and no fallopian tubes and no uterus and no cervix could ever be a man, how many of them do you think would say "yes"?", and you said "Again, I think there would be some confusion but I think nearly all would give a qualified "yes".". That was a gender evaluation.

Truth by poll??

Gender is a social construct. How do you propose to research social constructs other than by asking members of the society how they categorize things? We're doing sociology here. Sociologists survey target populations all the time, at least when they're trying to do objective social science and not just politics or armchair philosophy.

Sex is relevant to gender but is not the final word on the matter. The final word is determined by society's criteria for categorizing people into genders. Sex is relevant because our society habitually uses sex as its main criterion. Self identity is irrelevant because our society habitually ignores self identity in its categorization criteria. In pre-women's-suffrage times, how many women were authorized to vote because they said they thought of themselves as men? In conscription times, how many men were exempted from the draft because they said they thought of themselves as women?

And gays weren't allowed to marry. Doesn't make the exclusion right.

"Right?!?" What the heck has "right" got to do with it? Are you trying to get us to infer an "is" from an "ought"?

Emily and seanie's contention that a "woman" is a "biologically female adult human", where "female" means having taken the Mullerian developmental pathway, is something they haven't adequately argued for; but neither have the trans-rights-activists here adequately argued against it. As a matter of logic, it is of course entirely possible that there is some rare DSD that creates adult Mullerian bodies that western civilization has been generally categorizing as male for the last 1500 years, or Wolffian female. If so, the people with that condition are respectively male men or female women. That is their gender; more than that, that is their sex, going by common usage. Biologists don't own the words "sex", "male" and "female" any more than trans-rights-activists own the words "men" and "women". If such a DSD exists, then biologists calling such a common-usage man "female", or such a common-usage woman "male", are using those terms as technical jargon. Biologists are of course perfectly entitled to make up and use any technical jargon they please; it doesn't make the rest of us wrong to stick to common usage. But then, as a matter of logic it's also entirely possible that there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter. So far nobody here has exhibited such a DSD.

The problem is that you are assuming all aspects of the person develop along the Mullerian or Wolffian pathways. In terms of physical anatomy any given part must be one or the other because all the anatomical changes are a transformation. That doesn't prove the mind works that way, though. Look at sexuality: does someone being attracted to women mean they can't be attracted to men? Of course not. Why should we assume gender is like the physical parts that transform and not like the mental parts that clearly can be both? The least surprising answer to me would be that a mental difference is more like sexuality (another mental difference) rather than anatomy (a physical difference.)

Dude! Autopilot! Quit keyword searching! No, I bloody well am not assuming all aspects of the person develop along the Mullerian or Wolffian pathways. I explicitly considered the possibility that some don't, and described how it would affect the analysis of gender if that turns out to be the case. I didn't say we should assume gender is like the physical parts that transform and not like the mental parts that clearly can be both. But likewise, we shouldn't assume the reverse either, as gender ideologues do. "Assume makes an ass of u and me." We should stop assuming and instead investigate the question empirically, like proper social scientists.

 

[Emily Lake]

I was talking about my medical records keeping becoming female. The most recent instance the radiologist noted "normal mammogram" on an x-ray of my abdomen.

Aside here, but you might want to see if there's a female Loren Pechtel somewhere in your vicinity. I've spent about a year going back and forth with a collection of doctors trying to get my records untangled, and get claims sorted out - there's another person with the same name and day of birth as me in the area. I keep getting bills for cardiology treatments despite not having any heart problems. The worst of it is that my neurologist *merged* our records, since apparently she has epilepsy too. So much fun.

 

[Emily Lake]

Well obviously.

But that would be asking men to change attitudes and make accommodations, instead of women.

Which is why that option has been largely overlooked.

Overlooked by who?

By pretty much everyone in this thread arguing that males who identify as transwomen should use female spaces, regardless of the fact that they are physically built like males and have entirely male anatomy.

That is a non-sequitur.

Are you intending to imply that it hasn't been overlooked, it's been considered and rejected?

Otherwise I'm not seeing how it's a non sequitur at all.

Men changing attitudes and making accommodations does not address the issue if transwomen feeling that they are women and want to be treated as such.

While I cannot speak for everyone else, behaving better as a goal is always preferred.

Men changing attitudes and making accommodations would negate the issue of some males with transgender identities feeling unsafe in the presence of other males though.

 

[Emily Lake]

Is it your belief that a person who declares themselves to be transgender actually perceives an opposite sexed body when they look in the mirror? That a male who identifies as a transwoman looks down in the shower and sees a vulval mound and does not see a penis?

No. They see wrong anatomy on their body.

I think you're making a baseless assertion here, and I think it's wrong. Seriously, I think you're assuming that this is the case, because this would make the entire thing make sense. Without that assumption, a whole lot of it doesn't make any rational sense at all. But I know several trans people, including a few in my family, and none of them express what you are saying - none of them perceive their genitals as being "wrong". Rather, they don't like how people interact with them because of their actual bodies, and they wish that people interacted with them as if they had a different body. But a whole, whole lot of them don't actually want to change their genitals, they just want people to pretend like they have different genitals. They want to keep their penises, use their penises for sex, but they want everyone else to pretend they don't have a penis, or at least pretend like they're not aware that a penis is part of their body. They want people to perceive them as having a female body, but they don't perceive their male body as being wrong.

If there was nothing deeper then the intersexed surgery cases would not have any higher rate of dysphoria than the population at large. But they have a much higher rate.

They don't, not in developed countries that don't have medieval approaches to gender roles and have reasonable medical technology. The rate of dysphoria in people with DSDs is not higher than in normally developed people.

Please also bear in mind that people with actual DSDs very strongly object to being called "intersex".

It's also worth considering that the cases we have documented of infant surgeries being performed and the person later having dysphoria and issues with their bodies are pretty much exclusively males who were forcibly given female-like external genitals. But all of their internal systems were still male. They developed dysphoria because their entire system was male and somebody cut their parts off and fashioned a poor facsimile of a vulva instead.

 

[Emily Lake]

Here I definitely disagree as languages can't discover words. Newton discovered calculus, it's testable, it's reproducible, it makes accurate predictions (simple example: volume equations are integrals of area equations.) That sure looks like a science to me. I'm sure there are other examples but that's the only one I know the origin on.

Newton didn't discover calculus, he and Leibniz invented calculus. It's not like calculus is some naturally occurring thing out there in the universe that was just waiting to be found. The invention of calculus is similar to the invention of computer languages - it's a system of syntax and definition that can be applied in order to represent a set of actions and outcomes.

 

[Emily Lake]

It's almost like it was a point refired a thousand times...

A bad argument repeated a thousand times doesn't make it a good argument.

 

[Emily Lake]

What I disputed was Semenya's gender, not Semenya's sense of self when it comes to his/her gender.

Good point... and something that I think should be considered. Semenya dresses in male-typical clothing, has a male-typical hair style, uses male-typical gestures and gait. To an outside observer with no prior knowledge of Semenya's internal thoughts about their inner self... they look like and present like a man. When it comes to gender, Semenya is a man. When it comes to sex, Semenya is male.

Semenya can have whatever gendery soul of womanliness they want to have, but there's nothing at all that an unbiased observer would perceive as being female or womanly at all.

Same is true of Imane Khelif, btw. Khelif presents in male clothing, and his coaches and friends interact with him in the way they would with other men in an islamic culture. They do NOT interact with Khelif in the way they would if Khelif were a woman.

 

[Emily Lake]

Emily made a claim about Semenya's gender (while probably intending to make a claim about sex -- Emily sometimes conflates those two.)

Mmm.... I disagree. I don't conflate them. Gender is an externally imposed set of social expectations, based on sex. Gender is bullshit, and I reject it.

Semenya can have whatever internal gender identity he wants. But Semenya's sex is male, and Semenya presents as a man and acts like a man and moves through life as a man. Any unbiased observer with no prior knowledge of Semenya's internal feelings would perceive them as a male man.

Images of Caster Semenya with his wife

 

[Emily Lake]

But you keep taking for granted that Semenya's self-perception is relevant. If you want us to believe it's relevant, show your work.

What else is relevant if not self perception?

Objective reality, FFS.

Seriously, if a schizophrenic's self-perception is that they're jesus returned, do you think everyone else on the fucking planet should convert to christianity and start worshipping Jack the Schizo as god's emissary on earth? If their self-perception is that they're Napoleon, do you think France should turn over control of the army to them?

If a teenage girl's self-perception is that they're overweight, do you think the medical community should prescribe them ozempic even though they're objectively anorexic?

Lol, I perceive myself to be a classical liberal. Somehow my self-perception doesn't seem to matter one whit to many of the posters here. So yeah, self-perception is pretty much irrelevant to anybody who isn't the self in question.

 

[Emily Lake]

We can't measure the brain.

Yes we can. We have MRIs, fMRIs, and neural mapping. We measure deterioration of the brain in people with Alzheimer's, We measure the electrical misfires in people with epilepsy.

I have a "relative" that is manic-depressive. We have no physical test that can detect manic-depressive so clearly there's no reason for her to be in a locked facility! (Suicide attempt.)

I know we're all old, but seriously, nobody calls it manic-depressive anymore. My sister is bipolar, and the degree of behavioral and emotional dysregulation can be observed and measured against a standard - it's part of how her psychiatrist developed her treatment plan, which drugs were recommended, and the cognitive behavioral therapy that was ordered for her. My husband's ADHD is measured by assessing his behavior and reactions relative to a standard based on neurotypical ranges, and if it were needed, an fMRI would show depressed executive function in the prefrontal cortex when given tasks requiring prioritization and decision making. His emotional dysregulation would show in his amygdala.

 

[Emily Lake]

The problem is that you are assuming all aspects of the person develop along the Mullerian or Wolffian pathways. In terms of physical anatomy any given part must be one or the other because all the anatomical changes are a transformation. That doesn't prove the mind works that way, though.

Mind-body duality then? The mind is separate from the body, making it the proxy to the soul?

 

[Emily Lake]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In considering a penis the objection was that the face scares. In considering the face the objection was the penis scares. One of those must be false. Or, as is typically the situation when you get a pile of bogus reasons, it's really about discrimination.

No, it doesn't. People generally assume that a man has a penis. More than 99 percent of the time they would be right.

Which does not address my point.

I have seen claims that what's scary is the penis, not the face because the face could be a wrong room mistake or the like. No MTFs in the women's.

But now we also have the claim that it's the face even when the genitals are not visible. But that would mean no FTMs in the women's.

No, what you have seen is that the face means there is a penis which means a possible assault.

You are ignoring my point. At this point it's been argued from both directions, they can't both be right.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Do you seriously expect us to take your word for it that the British people and the British courts can't figure out for themselves whether they like the consequences of having put gender ideologues in charge of policy unless they can find a cabal of Americans to pull their puppet strings for them? That's really not how the British think. ... Why the heck would a TERF be the least bit influenced by P2025 nuts? You do know what the RF in TERF stands for, don't you?

The thread title is about England but we are in America, I'm looking at what's happening here.

So your theory is what, that the British are fully capable of deciding all on their own that rule by progressive whackjobs is bad for them, but Americans would just love being ordered around by all our "self-congratulation as social policy" anointed ones if only a conspiracy of right-wingers hadn't told us we don't like it? You are proposing two explanations where one would serve. It's unparsimonious. You might as well tell us the ammonites and mosasaurs died out 65 million years ago because of an asteroid impact and coincidentally the tyrannosauruses died out at the same time because the mammals ate their eggs.

I'm addressing America, not England.

Have you read what P2025 says about the trans?

A bit. Looks pretty much like they licked their fingers to see which way the wind was blowing and endorsed it. I haven't seen them say anything about the trans that doesn't look like it would win in a national referendum.

Ok, you haven't read P2025.

And does it not occur to you that not everything is straightforward? The Nazis benefit from stirring up the TERFs, why do you think they wouldn't do a false flag operation??

Oh for the love of god! The Nazis aren't stirring up the TERFs. Why do you even think progressives keep calling gender critical people "TERFs", when most of us are nothing of the sort? It's because the TERFs were the first ones on top of this issue -- they saw it coming a mile off while the rest of us were caught napping! The P2025 folks got it from the so-called "TERFs", who got it from the actual TERFs, not the other way around. The progressives had tied themselves to a deeply unpopular cause, and eventually P2025 noticed the strategic error by their political extremist mirror images, so they took advantage of it.

Logic failure. All As are Bs doesn't mean all Bs are As.

Emily has even admitted the situation existed for a long time without a problem.

Methinks the situation you have in mind when you say "the situation" is not the same situation Emily agrees existed for a long time without a problem.

MTFs in the women's. It's been going on for a long time, in some countries for nearly 100 years.

That's a map-vs-territory fallacy -- the mere fact that you can choose to put the same label on two situations does not imply the two situations are the same. There are quite a few differences between what's going on now and what had been going on for 100 years without a problem, and the circumstance that you don't care about those differences doesn't magic them away. Emily has pointed some of those differences out and they're important to her.

Except she's going on hypotheticals.

What's changed is the reich wing stirring up hatred. They can't ship them off to the camps until they've sufficiently demonized them.

Oh please. Nobody is going to be shipped off to the camps for being trans. It's the people speaking out against gender ideology who are getting persecuted by the legal system. Hatred is being stirred up by the left wing with the hateful and insane policies they impose on a largely unwilling public.

Wake up!

We already are at the concentration camp stage. That prison in El Salvador.

And I see little difference between "deport to South Sudan" and "death camp". And I see little difference between Worm Brain's "solution" for psychiatric drugs and Auschwitz.

But being an illegal immigrant is illegal. Being trans is not illegal. Even if Worm Brain and Voldemort want to make it illegal, and even if they can get a compliant Congress to go along, they'll be up against the reasoning in Bostock -- a decision written by a Voldemort appointee.

1) You're not addressing my point at all. Are you saying you don't care about death camps for criminals?? Or death camps for those with mental health issues?

2) You haven't read P2025. It defines being trans in public as pornography. And if you're seen by a minor it's exhibiting pornography to a minor.

And what level of confinement does he mean for the homeless? Since it's both criminal and psychiatric do you think it would be less than Worm Brain's death camps?

Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1. Purpose and

www.whitehouse.gov

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We can measure someone's height. We can't measure their gender even though we can observe that most people have one.

How the heck do you figure we can observe they have one but can't measure what it is?!? That's like saying we can observe the sky has a color but can't measure it to be blue.

In any event, yes, of course we can measure their gender, the same as sociologists can measure class or anything else they study. When you wrote "She's got a vagina. ... If you asked 100 random guys if someone who has a vagina could ever be a man, and didn't reference DSDs or chromosomes, how many of them do you think would say "yes"?", that was you proposing a method to measure Semenya's gender.

We can measure the physical anatomy. We can't measure the brain.

I have a "relative" that is manic-depressive. We have no physical test that can detect manic-depressive so clearly there's no reason for her to be in a locked facility! (Suicide attempt.)

You appear, just like every gender ideologue ever, to be equivocating between "gender" and "gender identity". They aren't interchangeable. Measuring the brain is relevant to gender identity, which like manic-depression is a matter of individual psychology. But gender is a social construct. What someone's gender is is therefore a sociology question, not a psychology question. So whether you can measure the brain impacts whether you can measure gender only if society's criteria for a gender include brain questions. Do you have any empirical evidence that society's criteria for a gender include brain questions?

And herein lies the difference. You regard it as physical anatomy, we regard it as something in the mind.

In the first place, you're clearly as usual equivocating between gender identity and gender. If we ever really need to test someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender, well, ever since trial-by-ordeal was abolished 800 years ago courts of law have been evolving techniques for recognizing liars and they've mostly gotten pretty good at it, and if necessary FMRI and AI are showing promise at giving us better polygraphs; but that needn't concern us here since nobody is disputing Semenya's sense of self. For present purposes we can take your "having stated her gender very clearly" criterion as an adequate test of "someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender". What I disputed was Semenya's gender, not Semenya's sense of self when it comes to his/her gender. I am of course no no more of an authority on someone's gender than anyone else is; society as a whole is the only authority on social constructs. What makes me more of an expert on someone's gender than someone else is my willingness to pay attention, educate myself as to society's criteria, and apply them.

And why do you think there's lying involved? She grew up being female. She doesn't feel that growing a penis changed that.

Dude! You're replying on autopilot again. Turn off your autopilot and read for content, not keywords. I don't think there's lying involved! I just said "nobody is disputing Semenya's sense of self", remember? The lying part was a hypothetical! That's what the "If" means! I was only talking about lying in the first place because Arctish asked me "How do you propose we test someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender? What would make you more of an authority on someone's gender than they are?" That's asking me to consider a situation in which I wouldn't take someone's word for his or her sense of self. Well, that sounds like a situation where there's reason to suspect the person of lying. A rapist trying to get sent to a women's prison instead of a men's prison is an obvious example.

You were proposing techniques to detect a lie--which are only meaningful if the person is lying. Thus you are implying she is lying about her gender.

And prisons are a separate case, I'm talking about in society in general.

None of that is in dispute -- nobody is blaming Semenya for identifying as a woman. Half of us would no doubt do the same if we were born without penises and grew them at 12. But you keep taking for granted that Semenya's self-perception is relevant. If you want us to believe it's relevant, show your work.

Why shouldn't it be? We don't get to define how she sees herself.

That's a circular argument. You're simply assuming that "how she sees herself" is relevant, which is precisely the point in dispute.

How she sees herself is certainly relevant to whether she feels male or female.

Gender? I said "If you referenced DSDs and asked 100 random guys if someone who has a vagina and a penis and testes and a prostate and no ovaries and no fallopian tubes and no uterus and no cervix could ever be a man, how many of them do you think would say "yes"?", and you said "Again, I think there would be some confusion but I think nearly all would give a qualified "yes".". That was a gender evaluation.

Truth by poll??

Gender is a social construct. How do you propose to research social constructs other than by asking members of the society how they categorize things? We're doing sociology here. Sociologists survey target populations all the time, at least when they're trying to do objective social science and not just politics or armchair philosophy.

You're still looking at the anatomy, not the mind.

Sex is relevant to gender but is not the final word on the matter. The final word is determined by society's criteria for categorizing people into genders. Sex is relevant because our society habitually uses sex as its main criterion. Self identity is irrelevant because our society habitually ignores self identity in its categorization criteria. In pre-women's-suffrage times, how many women were authorized to vote because they said they thought of themselves as men? In conscription times, how many men were exempted from the draft because they said they thought of themselves as women?

And gays weren't allowed to marry. Doesn't make the exclusion right.

"Right?!?" What the heck has "right" got to do with it? Are you trying to get us to infer an "is" from an "ought"?

The point is that just because something was baked into law doesn't mean it's right.

Emily and seanie's contention that a "woman" is a "biologically female adult human", where "female" means having taken the Mullerian developmental pathway, is something they haven't adequately argued for; but neither have the trans-rights-activists here adequately argued against it. As a matter of logic, it is of course entirely possible that there is some rare DSD that creates adult Mullerian bodies that western civilization has been generally categorizing as male for the last 1500 years, or Wolffian female. If so, the people with that condition are respectively male men or female women. That is their gender; more than that, that is their sex, going by common usage. Biologists don't own the words "sex", "male" and "female" any more than trans-rights-activists own the words "men" and "women". If such a DSD exists, then biologists calling such a common-usage man "female", or such a common-usage woman "male", are using those terms as technical jargon. Biologists are of course perfectly entitled to make up and use any technical jargon they please; it doesn't make the rest of us wrong to stick to common usage. But then, as a matter of logic it's also entirely possible that there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter. So far nobody here has exhibited such a DSD.

The problem is that you are assuming all aspects of the person develop along the Mullerian or Wolffian pathways. In terms of physical anatomy any given part must be one or the other because all the anatomical changes are a transformation. That doesn't prove the mind works that way, though. Look at sexuality: does someone being attracted to women mean they can't be attracted to men? Of course not. Why should we assume gender is like the physical parts that transform and not like the mental parts that clearly can be both? The least surprising answer to me would be that a mental difference is more like sexuality (another mental difference) rather than anatomy (a physical difference.)

Dude! Autopilot! Quit keyword searching! No, I bloody well am not assuming all aspects of the person develop along the Mullerian or Wolffian pathways. I explicitly considered the possibility that some don't, and described how it would affect the analysis of gender if that turns out to be the case. I didn't say we should assume gender is like the physical parts that transform and not like the mental parts that clearly can be both. But likewise, we shouldn't assume the reverse either, as gender ideologues do. "Assume makes an ass of u and me." We should stop assuming and instead investigate the question empirically, like proper social scientists.

And this still comes down to anatomy vs mind.

 

[laughing dog]

In considering a penis the objection was that the face scares. In considering the face the objection was the penis scares. One of those must be false. Or, as is typically the situation when you get a pile of bogus reasons, it's really about discrimination.

No, it doesn't. People generally assume that a man has a penis. More than 99 percent of the time they would be right.

Which does not address my point.

I have seen claims that what's scary is the penis, not the face because the face could be a wrong room mistake or the like. No MTFs in the women's.

But now we also have the claim that it's the face even when the genitals are not visible. But that would mean no FTMs in the women's.

No, what you have seen is that the face means there is a penis which means a possible assault.

You are ignoring my point. At this point it's been argued from both directions, they can't both be right.

I am trying to correct your misconception , but since you are on autopilot, I see that is pointless.