But that's far from the only way to discern a person's sex
It's the only way to determine the sex of a person whose secondary characteristics are contradictory or ambiguous, and who you suspect of lying.
Which is the entire problem here.
No, that's not the problem, and it never really has been. The problem isn't females who have features that are a bit more masculine than the average woman, nor is it females who seem somewhat androgynous. The problem is people who are OBVIOUSLY male who are claiming they have a RIGHT to invade female-only spaces because of their gender feelings.
Cases like Colleen Francis or Darren Merager or Alex Drummond or Eddie Izzard
That may be *a* problem your approach solves, but it's not *the* problem. On the other hand, what Politesse and bilby describe is a problem your approach *creates*. If you think that's a price worth paying, you're welcome to say so explicitly, but pretending it doesn't exist is either dishonest or naive.
This is a complex world where actions have unintended consequences. Judging them by their intent only is going to predictably lead to suboptimal solutions.
I strongly disagree.
Look - for many, many years, none of this was a problem at all. We had some transsexual people who used female spaces, and they were accepted into them. In some very few cases, it's because we couldn't tell that they were female - they successfully passed. When we're talking about bathrooms, passing just means that they looked reasonably female and didn't have any obvious male indicators. A somewhat masculine or butch looking person that still had the overall general physique of a female human being was never questioned. Even when they didn't pass well, even when they had an easily discernible adam's apple and huge shoulders and a 5-o'clock shadow, it was never a problem in bathrooms because they were always clearly trying to pass, were clearly trying to fit in, and were clearly respectful and considerate of the women around them. When we're talking showers or similar, they either had genital reconstruction surgeries or they kept their genitals covered so as to not make it obvious that they were actually male.
We were already accepting of transsexual people.
The problem we have now is different. The problem is that within the last decade or so, the entire paradigm shifted so that it's now based only on a person's declaration that they feel transgender. Now, we end up with people who are obviously male in female spaces - and they don't pass well, they're frequently not even trying hard to pass, and even more than that - they domineeringly demand that we MUST accept them without question. Now we're in a situation where LITERALLY any man on the fucking planet has been given free access to any female space and women are no longer allowed to question them or to tell them to leave. We're in a situation where any man at all can literally toss on some fucking lipstick, waltz into the female side of a nude spa with his dick a swinging... and if women feel uncomfortable with this, women are told that they're bigots who need to be reeducated and just accept that the dude with the semi sitting in the spa next to you is just as much of a women as you are.
Do you not get the problem with this? Do you not see the shift that has happened?
And now, we end up with this misleading narrative that the only way you can tell someone's sex is by forcibly checking their potty parts... as if we don't have millions of years of evolution behind us that allows us to pretty accurately discern a person's sex, as if Eddie Izzard is totally interchangeable with Zooey Deschanel and nobody can possibly tell the difference. FFS, you guys end up arguing that if Zooey is wearing pants and Eddie is wearing heels, everyone on the entire planet is going to be totally convinced that Zooey is a dude and Eddie is a chick.
It's wrong, it's blatantly false, and you all know it. You absolutely know this isn't the case, but the same narrative keeps getting pushed - and it's pushed by MALES. It's not females in here trying to gaslight me into thinking that it somehow hurts women if we try to maintain a reasonable expectation of sex-separated spaces, that it's a violation of women's autonomy to have some reasonable expectation that we're not going to find ourselves forced to share intimate spaces with a person with a dick and balls.
It's never women insisting this - it's always males who are demanding that if women don't submissively accept any male who says they have gendery feels as being just as much a women as they are then we're hurting women.
How on earth can you possibly thing that women wanting to retain sex-specific intimate spaces is somehow a newly created problem that will hurt women... and that forcing women to allow any man who says magic words into those spaces is somehow going to be good for women?