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[ZiprHead]

If humans weren't primarily heterosexual we would have died out long ago.

Nah, as long as humans have lots of sex with lots of partners, they could be primarily bisexual or homosexual, and the species would persist.

As long as sexual encounters massively outnumber pregnancies (as they certainly do in humans) being primarily heterosexual isn't necessary for the species to persist and even thrive.

Um... Bisexual I'll give you. But a homosexual person can get it on with someone of the same sex every minute of every day for their whole life and I guarantee they will not make babies.

Some people actually understand how reproduction works.

Yeah, homosexuals have never had sex with the opposite sex.

 

[Emily Lake]

We need to learn to live with it. But that'll require a great deal of time. Also trust. Ultimately it should be based on identity and behavior. Lesbians aren't required to have their own changing room. But if one was observed enjoying the view, there would probably be consequences.

Accommodating the rights of transgenders in the locker is tricky because it isn't what we are used to and even when given time, it will never become something that is common, with transgenders not being a particularly common percent of the population.

You mean: women need to learn to live with it.

People who are upset with it for the reasons you present, yes, they do.

If you think that the trauma of being assaulted by someone who looks some way, is sufficient to deny access to folks who look some way to spaces, then this is no different in my mind from those who make such arguments over the way of looking inherent to perceptions of race.

People have a responsibility to recognize while that person may have what they judge to be a penis, they are not the same person with what they judge to be a penis that did that to them.

There are drugs. There are therapies. You don't have to get over your fear of eating ice cream. People don't need to eat ice cream. You don't have to get over your fear of eating fruit, or of having feet in your face.

You DO have to make a good faith effort to get over your fear of people who look some way that they didn't choose, especially when they act in good faith to not do the things that made you hate people who look that way.

Said in other terms, from a corpus of writing I like by PirateAba, The Wandering Inn, perhaps mangled a bit as is from memory: "You are a goblin. Goblins kill humans. But you aren't the goblin that tried to kill me."

...If you can't accept that the people around you will behave like people, if you can't give them that chance, that's on you, and you have to sort that out. And yes, every person who distrusts "men" and decides to put that on trans women. Distrust them and drive them off and starve them out and push them away from your fire... when they earn it.

Invite them back...when they show you they are capable of and will continue to act like people, for the reasons people do.

Hey hey, 81% of the females in the US just need to get over themselves and take some drugs and get some counseling. It's totally on women to change themselves so that they don't have any fear of strange men. No man should be expected to alter their behavior, or to police the behavior of other men. Nah, it's those fucking uppity women who need to accommodate men.

 

[Emily Lake]

We need to learn to live with it. But that'll require a great deal of time. Also trust. Ultimately it should be based on identity and behavior. Lesbians aren't required to have their own changing room. But if one was observed enjoying the view, there would probably be consequences.

Accommodating the rights of transgenders in the locker is tricky because it isn't what we are used to and even when given time, it will never become something that is common, with transgenders not being a particularly common percent of the population.

You mean: women need to learn to live with it.

If we are saying a person's gender is defined by more than merely genitalia all the while including a "but", we'll need to determine where this definition applies and where it doesn't. Where are they going to be judged on dangly bits verses where they'll be judged by the character and identity. And then later ask ourselves if these boundaries make sense.

Gender isn't sex.

And I don't see any good argument for why a persons's subjective, internal, and unverifiable gender identity should overshadow sex in terms of policy.

And I also don't see any good reason to go barging through eliminating currently existing chesterton's fences and then waiting to re-evaluate until after harm has occurred. And bear in mind that this is while actively ignoring the cases of harm that have ALREADY occurred because policies keep getting made that eradicate women's rights to have boundaries in the first fucking place.

 

[Emily Lake]

Fuzzier side of the lollipop?

I must have seen Some Like it Hot too many times.

Where are their rights not superceding the rights of others?

Is this the right of a grown man to shower naked at the gym with girls?

I mean, why are you even here? It is just one hyperbole, one strawman, one goalpost shift after the other. You seem to be allergic to discussions in good faith.

Other than that whole thing where that actually, literally happened? More than once?

 

[Emily Lake]

That's a very masculine looking trans person, and therefore atypical. Most trans people claiming to be feminine would not be so obviously and stridently male, and would not be hitting on females. What about the case of a much more feminine looking trans person claiming to be female (or male) in the men's room?

20 years ago you might have been right. Presently, you are not right. Not even a little bit right.

Go look into accounts from lesbians of heterosexual males who identify as "lesbian" transwomen pressuring them to have sex with their "female" penises. There are entire fucking articles written that proclaim it's transphobic for lesbians to exclude transwomen from their dating pools, and that any lesbians that categorically reject people with penises from their potential dating pool need to examine their prejudices and unlearn their bigotry.

FFS, you can find that argument being made on this very forum by one of our own members... one who felt justified in declaring same-sex attraction which excludes transgender people of the opposite ACTUAL sex as having a "genital fetish" and that those people should examine their motivations.

Do you think Eddie Izzard or Sam Smith or Rachel Levine are delicate teensy things that no women would recognize as being male? Hell, this is not so hard - go hit up any social media and search for transgender ftm tags and take a look. The Blaire Whites are in the minority. The Alex Drummonds are ascendant.

 

[Bomb#20]

Nah, as long as humans have lots of sex with lots of partners, they could be primarily bisexual or homosexual, and the species would persist.

Um... Bisexual I'll give you. But a homosexual person can get it on with someone of the same sex every minute of every day for their whole life and I guarantee they will not make babies.

Some people actually understand how reproduction works.

Gay men have been making babies with women at least as long as homosexuality has been socially punished and at least as long as parents have been pressuring their children to provide them with grandchildren. It's a simple matter of lying back and thinking of England, or, more likely, of some guy the gay man would rather be copulating with. It's not in principle different from a man having sex with his wife while fantasizing that it's his mistress or whatever other woman he's more attracted to. One of my profs related the story of Mahler describing his difficulties with marital intimacy to Freud, which Freud treated by advising Mahler to distract himself during sex by thinking about his mother. [Cue Tom Lehrer song...]

 

[Emily Lake]

Look how many attacks are made by people who have ears.

Or black hair.

Or tattoos.

Or who drive a Toyota Camry.

Or who live in Hoboken.

A statistical correlation is not, or should not be, sufficient to justify policies or legislation that make a scapegoat of a minority population rather than addressing the real issues that face society. I worry more about whether women in our society are safe than whether the most advantaged women in society feel safe. Anti-trans laws make people less safe rather than more safe, so I oppose them on principle.

Thank you Mr. Man, for sharing your manly opinion.

 

[Emily Lake]

Time and a place, is the thing. If someone wants to talk about their trauma for its own sake, or work through the feelings they have about a social issue, I'm all ears. We should absolutely support people who are suffering, and I do my best to do that in daily life. But when someone is weaponizing their own fear and trauma to impinge on another person's rights, that's not good. And giving into that and letting them do so will not heal their wounds.

Those of us in the LGBT community are not just familiar with, but very tired of hearing, the line of reasoning which goes "I'm scared of people who are different, therefore society should protect me from needing to ackowledge them, even if their rights are curtailed to make room for that false sense of security." Countering that attitude has been a constant refrain throughout the entire history of gay rights, bi rights, interracial rights, trans rights, Native rights.... Certain folk are scared of their neighbors, but pandering to that fear neither eliminates the fear (it's still there, it's always going to still be there because your fear of the other is truly located in your mind, not inside that other) nor does anyone else a speck of good.

And no, men are not the only people who support trans rights, nor are all women intolerant of them. That's a false dichotomy, nothing more.

Have you bothered to talk to any of the LESBIANS in your LGB community? About their experiences with males in general? Are you supportive of the view that lesbians who categorically exclude transgender identified males from their dating pool are transphobes who need to overcome their genital preference?

 

[Emily Lake]

It is exactly the expectation to not see a penis in a public locker room for all women, which is at issue here. Why should you be able to expect that?

Because unlike you, we understand the difference between figurative and literal language. And because, unlike you, we understand that calling a transwoman a "woman" is 100% figurative, and is not literal in any way at all. And because we understand that the women's locker room is a literal use of the word woman, not a figurative one.

Don't do this retro-active linguistic bait and switch. It's shallow and transparent, and you're not winning anything by it. You're not convincing anyone with it. So just stop.

We all - every fucking one of us in this thread - know damned good and well that the Women's locker room was named the Women's Locker Room when Women meant FEMALE HUMAN and that it has NEVER - including now - explicitly meant "Anyone who thinks they have womanly feels or wants to be around women while women are naked".

Every single fucking one of us knows that every single fucking one of us was birthed by a woman, none of us were birthed by a man.

 

[Bomb#20]

That's a very masculine looking trans person, and therefore atypical. Most trans people claiming to be feminine would not be so obviously and stridently male, and would not be hitting on females. What about the case of a much more feminine looking trans person claiming to be female (or male) in the men's room?

20 years ago you might have been right. Presently, you are not right. Not even a little bit right.
... The Alex Drummonds are ascendant.

^^^^ This ^^^^. The rise of gender ideology coincides with a social revolution within trans people's subculture. Trans people used to be categorized as "Post-Op", "Pre-Op", and "Non-Op". Back then, trans discourse was dominated by post-ops' and pre-ops' issues; non-ops were treated as the tail of the dog. But the nifty thing about having a stack instead of principles is how volatile stack ranking can be. The tail is now wagging the dog. Women are losing something precious to them on account of who outranks whom -- no surprise there -- but for a change it's not because men outrank women.

 

[Bomb#20]

And there's the problem. Virtually no one is asking anyone to accept that females have penises. They are saying my brain is telling me my body is differant than what my brain tells me it should be and I wish to be respected as the gender my brain tells me I am. Metaphor rejects that.

Met rejects that ANYBODY ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD is obligated to accept your brain's belief in any way whatsoever. If your brain was completely insistent that you were Napoleon reborn, nobody else should give you command of their military.

Gay people (of which Met is one) demanded equal rights. Their demand should probably have been rejected because no one should be obligated to accept their brain's belief in any way whatsoever.

Nobody's equal rights depend in any way on his or her being agreed with. People do not need to "accept" that Metaphor is gay, or that Metaphor's sexual orientation is not something he chose, or that Metaphor is entitled to respect, or that gay sex isn't a Sin against God and Nature, in order to refrain from beating him up for preferring male sex partners. All it takes to not beat someone up is not beat him up. This is not rocket science.

 

[Emily Lake]

And there's the problem. Virtually no one is asking anyone to accept that females have penises. They are saying my brain is telling me my body is differant than what my brain tells me it should be and I wish to be respected as the gender my brain tells me I am. Metaphor rejects that.

Met rejects that ANYBODY ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD is obligated to accept your brain's belief in any way whatsoever. If your brain was completely insistent that you were Napoleon reborn, nobody else should give you command of their military.

Gay people (of which Met is one) demanded equal rights. Their demand should probably have been rejected because no one should be obligated to accept their brain's belief in any way whatsoever.

Would you be willing to do a compare and contrast between the rights that gay people demanded and the rights that transgender people are demanding? Including an impact assessment looking at how those demanded rights effect other people?

Because I believe... let me check.. yes... "Don't let people beat the shit out of us" and "Decriminalize sodomy" and "We'd like to be allowed to marry so that our life partners get the same benefits that any other life partner in the nation gets" don't impose ANY obligations on other people, nor does it take away the freedoms of any other person, nor does it force any other person to take part in their homosexuality in any way at all.

On the other hand... the "rights" being demanded by transgender activists (not necessarily by transgender people themselves) obligate other people to accept that their unverifiable and subjective view of themselves as taking precedence over objective reality, it obligates females to relinquish our right to consent and to boundaries, it grants the privilege of a special set of people being allowed to violate sex-based spaces on nothing more than their say so.

It's not equal rights, it's special rights.

 

[Emily Lake]

That which doesn't fuck up a specimen too badly gets passed on.

100% a process. No thought, not even any real predictability.

Which makes its problem solving power absolutely astounding IMHO.

I watched a fantastic lecture on YouTube about non-Darwinian evolution. It was pretty cool. Turns out way more of our evolution is neither survival of the fittest nor sexual selection... it's very simply that some random mutations didn't fuck things up enough to keep the specimen from reproducing. It was pretty cool.

 

[Emily Lake]

I am Politesse, telling Toni that sex discrimination is wrong, and I refuse to represent anyone but myself in that opinion.

In this case, you are Politesse, a male in a still strongly sexist society, telling Toni, a female in a still strongly sexist society, that her desire to have a space free from males while she is naked is wrong.

This is in a situation where there is zero risk to you, zero cost to you, zero discomfort to you. But there is a risk and a cost and discomfort to Toni (and me).

For all intents and purposes, you're a man telling a woman that she is wrong to not trust all men, and that she is wrong for insisting that her boundaries and her consent must be respected by men.

You are a privileged person, speaking from a position of privilege, telling an oppressed person that they are wrong to seek freedom from oppression.

 

[Emily Lake]

One could say evolution is nothing but quirks. And gay guys never get women pregnant???

If we didn't have social pressure to be heterosexual, then no. A male who is exclusively sexually attracted to males, and who only engages in intercourse with males, isn't going to get a female pregnant.

 

[Emily Lake]

If humans weren't primarily heterosexual we would have died out long ago.

Nah, as long as humans have lots of sex with lots of partners, they could be primarily bisexual or homosexual, and the species would persist.

As long as sexual encounters massively outnumber pregnancies (as they certainly do in humans) being primarily heterosexual isn't necessary for the species to persist and even thrive.

Um... Bisexual I'll give you. But a homosexual person can get it on with someone of the same sex every minute of every day for their whole life and I guarantee they will not make babies.

Some people actually understand how reproduction works.

Evolution is a population level phenomenon. As long as exclusive homosexuality isn't a trait exhibited by the overwhelming majority of humans, the species can persist and even thrive, because the remaining individuals are quite capable of taking up the slack.

Many species exist, persist, and thrive, in which we observe only a minuscule percentage of individuals producing any offspring at all.

Some people actually understand how evolution works.

Maybe re-read this exchange?

You disagreed with Zipr's comment that the species only exists because we are predominantly heterosexual... then you go on to say that as long as the species is predominantly heterosexual we will persist.

Additionally, arguments referencing the reproductive dynamics of other species entirely are pretty irrelevant. It's up there with people making the argument that humans can change sex because clownfish. Or that human amputees can grow back their missing legs because lizards.

Humans are not a species that is based around an extremely small set of breeding females, and where most other non-dominant members of the species are prevented from mating. In fact, we're extremely susceptible to harmful and damaging traits via inbreeding - we need a sufficiently large number of breeding pairs to allow genetic drift. We have many, many non-Darwinian genetic traits locked up in our DNA, and only the proclivity of our species to have relatively unfettered access to breeding keeps those random mutations from becoming a problem.

There are much fancier ways of saying that. This is my armchair evolution version of it.

 

[Bomb#20]

There is no reality to "human" as a species. The selection of common ancestry by which the tree is drawn is itself arbitrary.

That is historically uninformed. Common ancestry is not what biological taxonomy is based on; homology is. The replacement of folk taxonomies by scientific taxonomy goes back to Linnaeus, who like practically every other biologist of his day was a creationist. The selection of homology was non-arbitrary in the most absolute and scientific way it could have been: it was the criterion that gave repeatable results. People now often assume the tree is based on common ancestry because common ancestry is the underlying physiological cause of homology so the two have gotten conflated; but for the decades between Linnaeus and Darwin biologists recognized and relied on homology because it worked without understanding why it worked, much like the period between Kepler and Newton when astronomers knew how orbits worked but didn't understand why.

All "species" are similarly arbitrarily drawn, for all we can place most things on one side or the other of such arbitrary boundaries.

We animals are all of us in some "ring species" with every other animal: a ring species laid out in time instead of in space. The difference between a spatial ring species and two regular species is that the intermediate forms connecting two regular species are all dead. Whether an animal is alive or dead is not arbitrary; hence a species is not arbitrary.

 

[ZiprHead]

I'm glad they're tightening up the rules... but no amount of hormone therapy is going to change a male physique into a female one. And even after years of hormone therapy, transwomen still retain a significant male advantage in athletics.

Puberty blockers reduce that difference significantly, as I understand.

 

[Jarhyn]

homology

And yet the idea of what someone considered similar to some other thing is in fact a conflation with the actual reality of what differentiates things.

The approach people take to taxonomy is just an arbitrary grouping based on what dimensions we arbitrarily decide are similar based on arbitrary measures.

One thing having things in common with another thing is not a guarantee that any other similarities will be observed or demanded within the system, which means that the rules were always made up in the first place, even if the results were apparently repeatable.

There's still no actual reality to these statistical imaginaries. They do not bind us in ways that allow prejudicial thinking to be apt.

You might be able to find that knowing statistical facts about groups let's you gamble, but gambling on people that way has a name, and that name is "prejudice".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I like how the NCAA is handling the issue.

In the decade since the NCAA established its previous policy allowing transgender athletes to compete, the controversy surrounding Thomas is the first of its kind. Those guidelines stated that transgender men should be eligible for men’s college teams immediately. Meanwhile, trans women were required to undergo one year of hormone therapy – generally consisting of taking testosterone blockers and exogenous estrogen – before being eligible for women’s teams. According to these guidelines, any trans athlete not taking hormone treatment was still also eligible to participate in an athletic program in accordance with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Under the NCAA’s new policy, which will begin in the 2022-23 academic year, trans athletes will need “documented [testosterone] levels at the beginning of their season,” a second test six months after the first, and a third test four weeks prior to championship selections. While the previous policy also required documented tests and a review panel, it stopped short of requiring this kind of consistent testing.

In addition, the NCAA has now opened the door for transgender athletes to be subject to excessive testing and stringent testosterone limits from national governing bodies. USA Swimming has already taken this approach by implementing a 36-month period in which trans women’s testosterone must be below 5 nanomoles per liter (nmol/l). That 36-month window is much longer than many existing policies. While the NCAA has stated it will not follow USA Swimming guidelines for the 2022-23 school year, the NCAA does indicate a phased rollout that would adhere to more stringent policies in adherence with the national governing bodies for each sport.

If a transwoman wants to gain access to women's spaces maybe some sort of certification needs to be involved.

Oops, forgot to add the link. https://globalsportmatters.com/science/2022/03/22/ncaa-policy-trans-athletes-participation-inclusion/#:~:text=Under the NCAA's new policy,weeks prior to championship selections.

I'm glad they're tightening up the rules... but no amount of hormone therapy is going to change a male physique into a female one. And even after years of hormone therapy, transwomen still retain a significant male advantage in athletics.

It's not just hormones that are different. Males and females are built different. And humans are fairly highly dimorphic. Males are bigger, stronger, and faster and that isn't all explainable by testosterone alone.

And luckily we've got this thing called the scientific method that allows us to test the hypotheticals and determine baselines required to ensure competitive fairness in sports. Likely the issue will be how early transgendered treatment occurs (assuming we don't get to the mental facilities for them part of the fascist track out nation is in right now).

The type of sport might also make a bigger difference on the baseline as well. Swimming, for instance, has clear physical benefits of body length and shoulder build. Where as other sports might not have such significant off the top advantages.

But what I read in your posts in clear conclusions and obvious fact. Yes, is Usain Bolt were to wear a wig and compete with women... it'd be an unfair advantage. But right now, if an 8 year old boy turn girl goes through treatment, how much of an advantage do they have on the woman's soccer team in college, swim team, fencing, etc...? We don't have the data. We need the data. It is going to be something that needs to be observed and policies updated with the data.