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

[TomC]

Whether giving men legal rights to use women’s restrooms is wise or granting special rights are completely different issues than whether doing so excludes women from using those facilities. .

Nothing you wrote rebuts that giving men legal rights to use women’s restrooms excludes women from using them. Perhaps the problem is that you don’t understand that excludes means to deny access.

Do you understand that sex and gender aren't the same thing? That male and men isn't the same?

What a darned patriarch. "But...but...a male wants it?!"

 

[Jarhyn]

transgendered women are not men, so that's really not an issue, is it?

Trans women are still male, that's where the problem is. Males are disproportionately threatening to females, whether or not trans ideologists recognize that fact.

Ya know what else? Most males who put some effort into presenting as a woman, then behaves properly in the restroom, isn't going to have a problem. Close shave, women's attire, do your business, keep your eyes to yourself, wash your hands and leave, and you probably won't have any trouble at all.
Tom

No they aren't still male, in any real sense. Either you just arbitrarily declare what male is, and then it's just arbitrary, or you declare it with some fixed process which I described and which excludes they as they are now as "males", because it is a reproductive-theoretic class according to literally the only definition and model presented that is actually coherent and complete.

 

[TomC]

No they aren't still male, in any real sense.

They are still male in every real sense.

In the abstract sense of gender they might be women, but in the world of objective reality they are not. They might identify as women, but that doesn't change the reality of sex.
Tom

 

[Jarhyn]

No they aren't still male, in any real sense.

They are still male in every real sense.

In the abstract sense of gender they might be women, but in the world of objective reality they are not. They might identify as women, but that doesn't change the reality of sex.
Tom

No they are literally NOT "male" in exactly the real sense.

The sense you are trying to invoke is literally ALL the senses in which maleness is not "real", because every one of those traits you are trying to invoke is held by some female somewhere, or someone who is not "male" and never has been.

You are trying to replace the actual reality of sex, the only strict reality to it there is, with a pro-normalist fantasy.

 

[TomC]

You are trying to replace the actual reality of sex, the only strict reality to it there is, with a pro-normalist fantasy.

Nope.
What you are trying to do is confuse the objective reality of sex with the abstraction of gender.
Tom

ETA ~I noticed that you edited your post, and I understand why.~

 

[TSwizzle]

And for the umpteenth time... stop using people's deleterious medical conditions as pawns for gender identity ideology. DSDs have nothing at all to do with gender identity, and they do not in any fashion at all support the notion that men with gender identity issues are somehow women.

I don't use it that way so stop accusing me of doing it.

Absolutely you do and you are doing it again.

 

[Jarhyn]

You are trying to replace the actual reality of sex, the only strict reality to it there is, with a pro-normalist fantasy.

Nope.
What you are trying to do is confuse the objective reality of sex with the abstraction of gender.
Tom

No, you are trying to replace the reality of sex with the trappings and tendencies around it.

Pull your head out your ass, please, and pay attention.

Literally the only way "male" can be defined consistently in nature is with an example and a process like I described.

It is a purely reproductive class.

If something cannot reproduce, it is not in either sex class.

That is the clearest, most concrete definition the word can have.

YOU are the one trying to confuse this with gender.

I pointed out that gender and this class are completely unrelated, and that when someone ceases to be on the reproductive regime, class membership ends.

What you seem to be seeking is some way to duck away from real definitions so that you can pretend normalist definitions which conflate and conjoin gender and sex might make sense.

 

[TomC]

No, you are trying to replace the reality of sex with the trappings and tendencies around it.

Nope, that's you.

Gender can be construed as "the trappings and tendencies" around sex. Nearly always, they are. But gender is an abstraction, sex is not. You are trying to replace the reality of sex with the trappings and tendencies around it.
Tom

 

[TomC]

It is a purely reproductive class.

If something cannot reproduce, it is not in either sex class.

This is the kind of nonsense you like to spew. If Joe decides he has enough kids and gets a vasectomy, you really think that he's not male anymore? That's stupid.
Tom

 

[Bomb#20]

When USA becomes a truly civilized nation, then maybe misinformation will not have FA protection.

If that sort of thing appeals to you, what should our future truly civilized nation call the government department that gets to decide which speech is "misinformation"? The "Ministry of Truth"?

No "Ministry of Truth" would be needed. You are obviously one of those people who believe that the government should control all aspects of people's personal lives. Misinformation in such as society would be countered by normal citizens and a responsible, ethical media.

What did you have in mind? Fact-checking and well-publicized refutation of claims that normal citizens and a responsible, ethical media judge to be misinformation? Pretty sure you can do all that without depriving the misinformation of FA protection. Under what scenario will a court find itself ruling that someone's words do not have FA protection because they're misinformation, but there's no "Ministry of Truth" to give the court guidance on whether the words are in fact misinformation? Would it be decided by polling normal citizens? Or perhaps by polling a responsible, ethical media?

Defamation and false statements are not protected speech.

The title of the article you linked is "Defamation and False Statements Under the First Amendment". You changed that in your link title in a way that makes the article out to be saying false statements are not protected speech whether they're defamatory or not.

Opinions are protected. You can have and express any opinion whatsoever. But if you're presenting not-true statements as facts, you risk consequences.

If they're defamatory. The context for all this is the government pressuring social media companies to censor claims (and opinions!) it defines as misinformation that aren't defamatory, most notably, claims and opinions about Covid. The hypothesis that what Harris said wasn't contemptuous of the First Amendment because she was only talking about defamation is fanciful.

Be that as it may, Harris has a long history of contempt for the First Amendment. She got the CA government forced by the courts to pay abortion opponents two million dollars to cover their legal expenses, because she tried to make the abortion opponents tell people abortion was available through state public programs.

 

[Bomb#20]

Can we go back to discussing biological sex and whether or not two categories, male and female, are sufficient to cover all the possible presentations?

Sufficient for what? For purposes of British law? For hundreds of years Common Law has dealt with the whole intersex issue by simply categorizing intersex people as men if they appear to be mostly male and women if they appear to be mostly female. Unless there's someone who appears to be exactly half and half, that seems like it would be sufficient for legal purposes.

Toni's post here contained a link that said persons with Swyer syndrome usually have a uterus, fallopian tubes, and non-functional gonads, so that explains how Hayley Haynes could become a mother of twins despite her XY karyotype after medical intervention to "grow" her millimeter sized uterus and using donated eggs.

OTOH, the 70 year old with Persistent Mullerian duct syndrome we talked about here , who had a normally formed uterus and fallopian tube, was able to father four children without medical intervention due to his also having a normally formed testis and penis.

I think we need to accept that 'intersex' is a biological reality and stop clinging to outdated concepts of strict duality in nature.

That will matter if at some point someone with one of the intersex conditions you describe applies for one of the positions reserved for women and someone else objects that he or she isn't eligible. But since the case was about whether a Gender Recognition Certificate was sufficient evidence that a person was female, and GRCs are generally issued to people with gender dysphoria rather than to intersexed people, it's not clear you're going back. Sounds more like a new topic.

 

[Arctish]

And for the umpteenth time... stop using people's deleterious medical conditions as pawns for gender identity ideology. DSDs have nothing at all to do with gender identity, and they do not in any fashion at all support the notion that men with gender identity issues are somehow women.

I don't use it that way so stop accusing me of doing it.

Absolutely you do and you are doing it again.

Examples. please.

I try to be clear when I'm talking about sex. I try to be clear when I'm talking about gender. If I've been unclear and caused some confusion, that's on me.

When I asked if we could get back on track and talk about the "biological sex" that's referenced in the thread title, I cited 2 instanced of people with XY chromosomes, the karyotype of males, who each had a uterus, the principal sex organ of females. I brought them up in order to highlight what I believe is a serious flaw in the court ruling in the OP and recent attempts in the United States to make "sex assigned at birth" some kind of benchmark for legal rights.

If there is a proposal to thoroughly examine the genome and internal organs of newborns in order to more correctly assign sex at birth, I haven't heard of it. It seems to me some folks want to continue to go by guesswork based on observations of external features even though we now know that system yields incorrect results at least some of the time.

And IMO, a person's sex should neither give them privileges nor deny them opportunities. It certainly shouldn't matter to anyone but themselves and their intimate partners if they're intersex.

 

[laughing dog]

Whether giving men legal rights to use women’s restrooms is wise or granting special rights are completely different issues than whether doing so excludes women from using those facilities. .

Nothing you wrote rebuts that giving men legal rights to use women’s restrooms excludes women from using them. Perhaps the problem is that you don’t understand that excludes means to deny access.

Do you understand that sex and gender aren't the same thing? That male and men isn't the same?

What a darned patriarch. "But...but...a male wants it?!"

For some inexplicable reason, you mistakenly feel your emotional outbursts are germane responses.

 

[Jarhyn]

It is a purely reproductive class.

If something cannot reproduce, it is not in either sex class.

This is the kind of nonsense you like to spew. If Joe decides he has enough kids and gets a vasectomy, you really think that he's not male anymore? That's stupid.
Tom

Only at low N and/or impermissive process definitions.

At high N and permissive process definitions, reproduction still happens.

Castration on the other hand, yes, absolutely 100% of the time that person ceases to be "male" according to reproductive class theory.

 

[Jarhyn]

Nope, that's you.

Gender can be construed as "the trappings and tendencies" around sex.

So, then, a penis is part of gender, because it is not "sex". It is a trapping and tendency around sex.

I described how to define sex in a consistent way. It completely ignores everything but the reproductive element.

You are the one trying to conflate them at this point.

How is this even a discussion? You are the one who keeps bringing up "trappings and tendencies" as a qualifier for if someone belongs in a space rather than the actual real definition of sex according to some example.

I keep reducing it to actual sex in the way sex is REAL, with respect to reproduction.

Quit trying to bring up stuff not pertinent to the thread.

 

[Arctish]

My previous post got a roll eyes reaction so I guess it's time for me to get really wordy and tell you all where I'm coming from on this topic.

I was born during the Eisenhower Administration and had a pretty typical 50s-60s childhood. We didn't talk about sex, at all. I'm sure some here remember the Dick Van Dyke Show and how Rob and Laura Petrie had separate beds in the same bedroom because heaven forbid the kids might get a clue where little Ritchie came from. When I reached my teens I naturally became curious about sex, which happened to be right about the time I got interested in history and mythology. That's when I learned about Hermaphroditos which led to my discovery of hermaphroditism and the fact that not everyone is strictly or only male or female. For a kid raised on the teachings of the Catholic Church and the life lessons of Ozzie and Harriet, that was quite a surprise!

So then, in the late 1960s, all female athletes were tested prior to their participation in Olympic competitions and the existence of women with XY or XX/XY karyotypes became common knowledge. Questions of fairness immediately arose. Was it fair to them to kick them out of the games? Was it fair to allow them to compete with women who had the XX karyotype and lower levels of testosterone?

And then I read about a soldier appealing his discharge from the Army. He and his wife sought medical treatment for her fertility issues. It was discovered she had the XY chromosomes of a male and iirc was diagnosed with androgen insensitivity. Her husband was discharged for being in a "homosexual" relationship, which I thought was entirely unjust.

Then the Stonewall riots happened, Gay Rights became an issue, sexual attraction was recognized as being separate from a person's sex but not unrelated to their sexual development, and research found differences in brain development related to gender that did not always conform with the XX=girls, XY=boys that typically happens. And then there were the articles I read about guevedoces and those teenagers in Gaza.

And then, right when Feminism and the Women's Rights movement were finally succeeding in dismantling harmful, socially enforced gender roles, gender identity became an issue and TERFs became a thing.

So here we are now, discussing a case where a court has ruled that sex assigned at birth matters more than gender identity when it comes to sex-specific set asides on public boards in Great Britain. I'm sure you all have your own ways of approaching the topic. Mine is to start with what for me was the starting point: a person's sex isn't a simple matter of XX or XY. It's not what a doctor thought a baby's sex was at first glance. It doesn't determine their gender, either. I have no doubt there are a lot more interesting discoveries to be made about sex and gender in the future and I am looking forward to learning about them. Meanwhile we are stuck dealing with sexism and why some folks feel a need to know other people's sex and gender, so they can assign them a place in society and maintain the current social order.

 

[Politesse]

When I think about "what it means to be a man" or "what it means to be a woman", the first thing I think is not that I should ask the British government for his opinion. Or the last thing I think. Or a thing I think at all.

 

[seanie]

The legal position isn't that sex is "assigned at birth" . It's that sex is a material fact that can be established. For the vast majority of people that will simply be their sex recorded at birth, but even if that isn't the case, and a person has a DSD, their sex can still be established, because sex is binary and immutable.

And since the law has long recognised there are situations where single sex spaces or services are required, for reasons of privacy, safety, dignity, or fairness, then sex in the Equality Act 2010 has to be understood as biological sex.

Otherwise the Act would be produce unworkable and perverse results.

 

[TomC]

The legal position isn't that sex is "assigned at birth" . It's that sex is a material fact that can be established. For the vast majority of people that will simply be their sex recorded at birth, but even if that isn't the case, and a person has a DSD, their sex can still be established, because sex is binary and immutable.

And since the law has long recognised there are situations where single sex spaces or services are required, for reasons of privacy, safety, dignity, or fairness, then sex in the Equality Act 2010 has to be understood as biological sex.

Otherwise the Act would be produce unworkable and perverse results.

Unless I misunderstood, the point to the OP was about males on public committees.
But yeah, this is one of the tiny handful of situations where sex is considered more important than gender identity.
A dude cannot put on a dress, declare himself female, and get the entitlements of both men and women. In this case, it appears that the subject is seats on a committee reserved for women. Whether or not that's a good thing or not, I don't know. But sex discrimination has helped bring more equality to the human situation in lots of ways.
Tom

 

[seanie]

That was just the case that the legal action rested on. But the arguments hinged on the Equality Act that has a very wide operation in how services and employment are delivered. The situations where discrimination is allowed to create single sex spaces are in one way fairly limited, but also fairly commonplace: changing rooms, hostels, medical services, communal accommodation, sport etc.

Also, if the ruling had gone the other way it would have negatively affected freedom of association for gay and lesbian people, as it would have rendered same sex orientation a meaningless category. As the Judges pointed out, you can't really tie sexual orientation to the possession, or otherwise, of a certificate.