Gender Roles

[Jokodo]

Equality of opportunity for males to have access to naked or vulnerable females without their consent?

You still haven't provided any indication that it actually happens.

Nurses suing their employer for allowing trans women to use their changing rooms

A group of NHS employees in Darlington say they are made to feel unsafe by a male staff member who identifies as a woman and after raising concerns their manager was called in by HR and told they needed to be "re-educated". A transgender charity says people need to be more accepting.

news.sky.com

More details are here. Sorry it's a Daily Fail article, but when nobody else is willing to actually quote the nurses' specific allegations, what are you going to do?

Look harder? Research better?

The Daily Mail's website is an STD on the Internet.

Yeah, and? You might as well say the Clinton campaign should have gotten away with rigging the primary against Sanders because the guy who revealed it is a scumbag. The Daily Mail's deservedly poor reputation is why I included the Sky link as well, so readers would know this is a real lawsuit and wouldn't claim the DM made it all up.

As far as looking harder and researching better go, what the heck are you on about? Did you even read all four links? Yours pretty much repeat the meager details in the Sky article. "However, as the allegations are now also subject to active legal action, it would not be appropriate for the Trust to comment further at this stage.", says your link, and apparently the entire British mainstream press thinks it would likewise not be appropriate for the press to comment further at this stage about what the allegations even are. After I'd plowed through a dozen-odd sites like those (including your Northern Echo link) that weren't willing to be more specific about what the nurses said the guy did than “taken a keen interest”, I gritted my teeth and included the Daily Mail link.

The religious organization backing them is political.

"The Trust has put transgender ideology before the rights of the nurses."

That is a peculiar argument to make, especially when it is being alleged that the person is effectively a male, not even transgender. That this isn't even about transgender rights, but allegedly about a guy who is violating women's spaces.

In the first place, the reason HR is letting the male nurse get away with this behavior and telling the female nurses they need to be reeducated is HR's submission to transgender ideology. Arguing "That doesn't count because the guy isn't really transgender" is adding insult to injury to the victims when making any administrative inquiry into the sincerity of someone's claim to be transgender is verboten for ideological reasons.

And in the second place, the guy identifies as female and goes by "Rose", and according to the female nurses he said he'd been on female hormones but had gone off them because he was trying to get his girlfriend pregnant. We can all make our own judgments about whether that counts as Rose even being transgender, but we can depend on it that anybody who argues you have to keep taking the hormones and not try to father a child to qualify as a transwoman will get accused of transphobia.

By both my dictum of "go where you cause the least fuss" and @Jarhyn 's "pregnancy theoretic" considerations, Rose should probably be in the men's changing room. I'm not even sure @Politesse would accept the notion that a physically fully intact male with a typical male hormone regime should be given instant access to all kinds of female-oriented spaces without qualifiers. We may live in a world where people who would call you would call you a transphobe for merely saying that Rose shouldn't be there in the first place exist, but you aren't arguing against any of them.

On the other hand, we also live in a world where Republican state legislatives pass laws that force all people born as biological males out of all female spaces. Would such a rule have prevented this particular case? Yes it would, but at what cost? Is this a problem worth solving? Of course it is, but it's far from solved with this one simple remedy. Women are being subjected to anything from uninvited innuendos by strangers to rape in offices, kitchens and elevators at rates higher than most men care to remember. There must however be a better solution than throwing fully "passing" trans women and people with partial androgen insensitivity - people who, from what I gather, even @Emily Lake would welcome in the women's, under the bus by forcing them to a place where they might be perceived as intruders or worse, an easy target, or forcing passing trans men to go where they predictably cause a stir.

If you are objecting to their solution, you aren't making it very clear, which leaves the impression you're accepting it as the least evil among all practically attainable solutions, and thereby accepting to throw those cases under the bus.

 

[Jarhyn]

@Jarhyn 's "pregnancy theoretic"

I will note that pregnancy theoretics is only applicable specifically in conjunction with steroid theoretics, with respect to prisons, and neither can be allowed in ways easily faked out of with regards to that context. This pretty much makes orchiectomy the golden standard in any regime I would advise with regards to prison.

With regards to sports HRT is generally going to be sufficient, and with regards to locker rooms, HRT and identification. Pregnancy theoretics don't enter there at all.

If someone is being a creeper on someone else in some public accommodation or space, it doesn't matter what any party identifies as OR what they have in their pants because harassment is harassment and shouldn't be tolerated anywhere by anyone. Pregnancy theoretics might serve to create a special class of crime modifier associated with creeping on someone in a public accommodation or space, but it's hardly necessary for the initial determination that being a creep in that way is wrong.

Each of these things is its own separate concern because each is a different context. With a different "game theory" about it. None of them is better served by "women" than by a deeper and "gender-free/sex-free" handling for all each tends to be "around" sex.

I recall back when Minnesota was debating tay marriage in our state Congress I argued what was them a conservative talking point: to explicitly take "marriage" away as a legal term and replace it with "domestic partnership contract" or "civil union", allowing anyone to say they were "married" by whatever definition they might offer, and let the term of law given teeth be neutral and sanitized of such beliefs.

I say the same thing today, and I repeat it again for "women" and "men". Attempts to legally define that which has no essential meaning in the first place, especially when such things are pure social constructs, seems foolish.

 

[Bomb#20]

By both my dictum of "go where you cause the least fuss" and @Jarhyn 's "pregnancy theoretic" considerations, Rose should probably be in the men's changing room. I'm not even sure @Politesse would accept the notion that a physically fully intact male with a typical male hormone regime should be given instant access to all kinds of female-oriented spaces without qualifiers.

Well, that does seem to be the logical implication of his zealous insistence on "we cannot have legal discrimination on the basis of sex in this country." and "nor that it is ever legal to discriminate on the basis of sex."

We may live in a world where people who would call you would call you a transphobe for merely saying that Rose shouldn't be there in the first place exist, but you aren't arguing against any of them.

Another poster already called me a transphobe for less, in this thread.

On the other hand, we also live in a world where Republican state legislatives pass laws that force all people born as biological males out of all female spaces. Would such a rule have prevented this particular case? Yes it would, but at what cost? Is this a problem worth solving? Of course it is, but it's far from solved with this one simple remedy. Women are being subjected to anything from uninvited innuendos by strangers to rape in offices, kitchens and elevators at rates higher than most men care to remember. There must however be a better solution than throwing fully "passing" trans women and people with partial androgen insensitivity - people who, from what I gather, even @Emily Lake would welcome in the women's, under the bus by forcing them to a place where they might be perceived as intruders or worse, an easy target, or forcing passing trans men to go where they predictably cause a stir.

If you are objecting to their solution, you aren't making it very clear, which leaves the impression you're accepting it as the least evil among all practically attainable solutions, and thereby accepting to throw those cases under the bus.

If you are objecting to guillotining all the aristocrats, you aren't making it very clear, which leaves the impression you're accepting it as the least evil among all practically attainable solutions. Well, either that or else your troubling silence on the matter of guillotining is due to nobody in the thread advocating that solution.

That said, why are you still peddling this narrative two months past its sell-by date? Yes, I bloody well did make it very clear, in posts #670, #761 and #769.*

And what's your point, anyway? Rightists being stupid is not evidence that leftists are smart.

(* If you find my prescriptions on how to handle specific situations insufficiently detailed for your taste, my position, to belabor points I've already made, is that I don't assume a one-size-fits-all solution is necessary or even desirable, and I am not champing at the bit to mansplain to women what it means to be a woman. I strongly suspect they know the subject better than I do and are not in any great need of my special insight. And I think neither a passel of Republican men in state legislatures nor a passel of Democratic men in academia are better qualified than I am to do all that mansplaining. I don't see a good reason either those men or I should even get a vote on who can use the ladies' room. It's called the ladies' room because it's a room that belongs to ladies. So if ladies want people like Rose kept out, sounds good to me. And if ladies want people with partial androgen insensitivity welcomed in, sounds good to me. Whatever the consensus among women is, I will back their play. Sufficiently detailed?)

 

[Bomb#20]

What we cannot have legal discrimination on the basis of sex in this country. Even if it were acceptable in principle, it would be impossible to enforce without further violations of civil rights. And I think even you will eventually start to miss the protections of the 14th amendment should your faction succeed in dismantling it.

'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.' - Anatole France

The tacit premise underlying the policies favored by both the right wing and the left wing is that this was a metaphor for gender:

Men and women are not mirror images.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I brought it up because you were claiming I support discrimination. I support equality of opportunity. Society used to be unequal, now it's unequal in the other direction.

Equality of opportunity for males to have access to naked or vulnerable females without their consent?

You still haven't provided any indication that it actually happens.

Nurses suing their employer for allowing trans women to use their changing rooms

A group of NHS employees in Darlington say they are made to feel unsafe by a male staff member who identifies as a woman and after raising concerns their manager was called in by HR and told they needed to be "re-educated". A transgender charity says people need to be more accepting.

news.sky.com

More details are here. Sorry it's a Daily Fail article, but when nobody else is willing to actually quote the nurses' specific allegations, what are you going to do?

If only the Daily Fail will print it perhaps there's a reason?

Transgender colleague stared as we undressed, hospital nurses claim

When a group of female NHS nurses complained to hospital bosses about the 'intimidating' behaviour of a trans colleague in their shared changing room, they at least expected a sympathetic hearing

www.dailymail.co.uk

... Another nurse said she was ‘close to tears’ during one incident. She said: ‘I was rummaging in my bag trying to find my lanyard and keys for the locker when a man’s voice behind me said, “Are you not getting changed yet?” ’

The woman – who was sexually abused as a child, has post-traumatic stress disorder and struggles to be alone around men – added: ‘He stood there, two metres from me, with a scrub top on and with tight black boxer shorts with holes in them and asked [again] whether I was getting changed yet... I felt glued to my seat, I could not move. My hands started to sweat. I was petrified and felt sick and began hyperventilating.’ ...

Note that such allegations are about supposedly looking. Something that can't be proven. And note this is someone with PTSD--they might be being triggered by something harmless. All the stuff I've seen claiming misconduct includes allegations of simply looking and never breaks it out adequately as to what actually happened. And data that looks like that is generally trying to paint a false picture.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The difference here is that black women are women. Transwomen are male. You're arguing that males are like black women, and that males are disadvantaged because women don't want to relinquish our boundaries and let males into our sex-specific spaces and services.

And what are you going to do when the transmen show up in the women's room?

The popular notion that providing single-sex spaces for women means we must also provide single-sex places for men is a case of valuing symbolic fairness above real fairness, much like trying to stand up for freedom by prohibiting burning American flags.

Either people use the bathroom corresponding to their birth anatomy or they use the bathroom corresponding to their current presentation. It makes no sense to treat them differently.

Why not? In the first place, male monkeys have spent the last thirty million years giving female monkeys good reason to fear us; the reverse is not the case. Our congenital brain wiring has taken the hint. Men who tell women "Just get over it." deserve a "Just get stuffed.". And in the second place, what exactly do you mean by "their current presentation", attempted presentation or actual presentation? Going by Jokodo's "Go where you cause the least fuss" dictum, it makes perfect sense for transmen to use the men's room and for transwomen not to use the women's room -- women trying to look male are much more likely to appear male to men than men trying to look female are to appear female to women. And the last thirty million years of monkey evolution gave us good reason for that too.

So you want all trans in the men's room. That inherently outs them and very well might be putting them in danger.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I brought it up because you were claiming I support discrimination. I support equality of opportunity. Society used to be unequal, now it's unequal in the other direction.

Equality of opportunity for males to have access to naked or vulnerable females without their consent?

You still haven't provided any indication that it actually happens.

Wi Spa
Prisons in WA, NJ, NY, and IL
Evergreen College pool
NHS Inpatient wards
Rape Shelters in Scotland
IL High Schools

Is your head in the sand?

So you consider the mere presence of a penis to be harmful?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Either people use the bathroom corresponding to their birth anatomy or they use the bathroom corresponding to their current presentation. It makes no sense to treat them differently.

People should use the bathroom that other people are most likely to assume they belong in. That means if they reasonably pass they get to use the bathroom that corresponds to their presentation, and if they don't pass they stick with the one that corresponds to their anatomy. Of course, that requires a degree of self-awareness rather than wishes, and would preclude Eddie Izzard using the women's lavatory.

But that goes against what you said earlier--that they should go to the men's room if you think they don't fit. Many times women have felt my SIL doesn't fit.

This is specific to bathrooms. It does not apply to showers, nude spas, or prisons. Nor does it translate into athletics, medical care, and other situations.

So what's your answer?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I occasionally advise a student club that advocates for Native American students. The membership is mostly Native, and it was always meant to be a place where Native students could meet, hang out, and talk about Indian stuff. This is fine and entirely legal. On the other hand, they cannot exclude non-Native students from the club, or kick someone out for being a "fake NDN" or "not NDN enough". That would be illegal as hell, and should be.

Same as my wife used to go to Curves--the local franchise owner admitted that legally they couldn't keep men out.

 

[Bomb#20]

And what are you going to do when the transmen show up in the women's room?

The popular notion that providing single-sex spaces for women means we must also provide single-sex places for men is a case of valuing symbolic fairness above real fairness, much like trying to stand up for freedom by prohibiting burning American flags.

Either people use the bathroom corresponding to their birth anatomy or they use the bathroom corresponding to their current presentation. It makes no sense to treat them differently.

Why not? In the first place, male monkeys have spent the last thirty million years giving female monkeys good reason to fear us; the reverse is not the case. Our congenital brain wiring has taken the hint. Men who tell women "Just get over it." deserve a "Just get stuffed.". And in the second place, what exactly do you mean by "their current presentation", attempted presentation or actual presentation? Going by Jokodo's "Go where you cause the least fuss" dictum, it makes perfect sense for transmen to use the men's room and for transwomen not to use the women's room -- women trying to look male are much more likely to appear male to men than men trying to look female are to appear female to women. And the last thirty million years of monkey evolution gave us good reason for that too.

So you want all trans in the men's room.

Non sequitur. You drew that conclusion by pattern-matching, not reasoning. What I want is women's boundaries to be respected. Transmen have a right to be in the women's room -- they're women. Transwomen who actually present as female can go in the women's room because nobody will try to stop them. And if women are willing to welcome in some categories of male-presenting transwomen, that's their option. One-size-fits-all solutions are not good solutions.

That inherently outs them and very well might be putting them in danger.

Transwomen who can't convincingly present as female but go out in public anyway are outing themselves. For those who can present as female, making it socially acceptable for women to use the men's room makes transwomen safer. Women often have good reason to use men's rooms -- shorter lines and cleaner toilet seats.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Oldspeak is Newspeak.

Yeah those trans people really are trying to start new wars all the time and stuff, and they're trying to start totalitarian dictatorships all the time. Also, you're bastardizing Orwell to fit your own personal political interpretation. Oh wait let me guess, I'm not allowed to point out how one thing is different from another thing. Anyway wake me up when trans people are actively trying to create totalitarian dictatorships and endless wars. Or whenever trans people have any significant power whatsoever to do so.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Oh yeah, and another thing Newspeak is supposed to do, if you knew anything at all, is destroy personal identity. Trans people don't want to destroy personal identity. So that's another reason why your false equivalence is complete bullshit.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So you want all trans in the men's room.

Non sequitur. You drew that conclusion by pattern-matching, not reasoning. What I want is women's boundaries to be respected. Transmen have a right to be in the women's room -- they're women. Transwomen who actually present as female can go in the women's room because nobody will try to stop them. And if women are willing to welcome in some categories of male-presenting transwomen, that's their option. One-size-fits-all solutions are not good solutions.

The problem here is that the set of AFABs includes some who do not appear sufficiently female. You need a rule.

That inherently outs them and very well might be putting them in danger.

Transwomen who can't convincingly present as female but go out in public anyway are outing themselves. For those who can present as female, making it socially acceptable for women to use the men's room makes transwomen safer. Women often have good reason to use men's rooms -- shorter lines and cleaner toilet seats.

Depends on the location. I've seen women show up in the men's room at tech events several times. I've never seen it elsewhere, though. The people who are at tech events do not represent anything like an average of the population.

 

[Bomb#20]

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Oldspeak is Newspeak.

Yeah those trans people really are trying to start new wars all the time and stuff, and they're trying to start totalitarian dictatorships all the time. Also, you're bastardizing Orwell to fit your own personal political interpretation. Oh wait let me guess, I'm not allowed to point out how one thing is different from another thing. Anyway wake me up when trans people are actively trying to create totalitarian dictatorships and endless wars. Or whenever trans people have any significant power whatsoever to do so.

Oh yeah, and another thing Newspeak is supposed to do, if you knew anything at all, is destroy personal identity. Trans people don't want to destroy personal identity. So that's another reason why your false equivalence is complete bull...

You appear to have lost the context. What I said was not about trans people in any way, shape or form. I was ridiculing Jarhyn's asinine line of argument, nothing more.

 

[Jarhyn]

Oh yeah, and another thing Newspeak is supposed to do, if you knew anything at all, is destroy personal identity. Trans people don't want to destroy personal identity. So that's another reason why your false equivalence is complete bullshit.

Like, I don't get what's so hard to understand, unless someone has been mainlining a conservative echo chamber, and I don't know where they would get that because this isn't such a place.

It feels like the sort of thing that would spawn out of a bunch of conservatives thinking it was a strong idea to use Newspeak on Newspeak in order to eliminate the idea from the lexicon.

People have been trying to rigorously control language from changing for a long time. Usually this distaste has something to do with being something or existing in some way that the person trying to control language would like to not exist at all.

It's funny because there are all sorts of words that could either be construed to mean exactly the same thing, or different things. Often these words exist in contexts where there is a distinction that could be made but where people often do not understand this possible distinction.

One example of this that springs readily to my mind is "ethics" and "morals/morality": many people construed these to mean the same thing with different usage patterns, whereas I would treat "moral" in a way specifically dealing with the pathos and feelings and ethics to be specifically dealing with the ethos and reasoning.

I would treat it as Newspeak if someone were to try to claim there is no such distinction that can be made here, and whatever you might say about whichever of these ideas can be said with one or the other without claiming both.

Likewise with sex and gender, I use sex to deal with the sum total of differentiations in some contexts, and to deal with modal groups in another, and gender to deal with whatever drives us to adopt roles in society and live according to them.

It just seems so absurd that some folks are cry-bullying over the fact that there are different words "female" and "woman"/"male" and "man"/"sex" and "gender" and they are trying to own both to mean the same thing, shutting people out of using them in more sensible ways to control the discussion, and they refuse to accept a compromise where any word might be used to discuss the topic of gender, of something dealing with the specifics of how individuals are physically "wired" with relation to such social concepts.

It just also happens that there's a largely pre-scientific essentialist view masquerading as scientific on the midst of this discussion, too (that sex is monolithic rather than modular).

 

[GenesisNemesis]

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Oldspeak is Newspeak.

Yeah those trans people really are trying to start new wars all the time and stuff, and they're trying to start totalitarian dictatorships all the time. Also, you're bastardizing Orwell to fit your own personal political interpretation. Oh wait let me guess, I'm not allowed to point out how one thing is different from another thing. Anyway wake me up when trans people are actively trying to create totalitarian dictatorships and endless wars. Or whenever trans people have any significant power whatsoever to do so.

Oh yeah, and another thing Newspeak is supposed to do, if you knew anything at all, is destroy personal identity. Trans people don't want to destroy personal identity. So that's another reason why your false equivalence is complete bull...

You appear to have lost the context. What I said was not about trans people in any way, shape or form. I was ridiculing Jarhyn's asinine line of argument, nothing more.

More bullshit. Oh so you're ok with trans people, in general, using pronouns then? No you're not, lol.