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

[Emily Lake]

How polite.

Says the dude who accused a fellow poster of having "victims" and of supporting "abuse".

You really have no idea what civility and politeness actual are, do you?

 

[Emily Lake]

You said everyone is either male or female. This is not completely true as you have acknowledged. That's all that I am saying. That people who do not fall neatly into the male/female dichotomy are still fully human and deserve as much respect and recognition as anyone else.

Literally nobody in this thread has suggested otherwise.

 

[Emily Lake]

But we have solid evidence for harm caused by having to use the bathroom that doesn't match your presentation.

What evidence is this? Where can it be found?

 

[Emily Lake]

I have a trans child.

No you don't.

I have two children, both adults.

The elder is trans, he/him pronouns, changed name, planning to undergo a double mastectomy, and can tear up if JK Rowling is mentioned.

The younger is a gay not queer, lesbian who doesn’t do dick, who goes to radical feminist conferences and has her photograph taken with Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce.

I love them both dearly, but Christmas can be a bit fraught.

That's got to make family gatherings tense.

I've got two trans-identified niece/nephews. The elder is an autistic, gay male who fixated on the concept of trans as a late teen, and who decided to transition at age 23 after they were an adult. For the last four years, they've lived with another autistic, gay male who also identifies as transgender. Neither have undergone any surgery - nor do they intend to; neither takes any testosterone suppressants, both take estrogen. So far as I can tell... they're gay men who like boobs and wearing female-typical clothing. But my nephew-now-niece was a complete adult when they decided to transition. They didn't have any mental health issues, no depression or anxiety or anything else. They have had support from all of us in our family, even though I don't necessarily agree that he is a "woman". We talked about whether or not they might want kids at some point in the future, and uncertainty about that is a part of why they don't take testosterone suppressants - just in case. We also talked about how estrogen alone has effects that are almost entirely reversible in males, and that if at some point they decide to stop taking estrogen, they have a very high likelihood of losing the fatty deposits that give them a slightly more feminine shape, and can pretty much go back to living as a man without any real hiccups. There are simply some topics we don't talk about... and that's fine - we also don't talk about religion or politics.

The younger is a female and I'm about 99% sure that she was raped or traumatically assaulted over the summer while she was 16. Prior to that, she was a fairly typical teenage girl, not even a tomboy, and well-adjusted. She spent the summer with her best friend at her friend's grandparent's farm in eastern washington. She came back sullen, depressed, withdrawn, wearing baggy clothes, slouching, and having periodic panic attacks. After a few months, she announced she was trans, spent 30 minutes with a doctor at planned parenthood, and walked out with a binder and a prescription for testosterone. She recently had a double mastectomy. Her mother, me, and my mom had all tried to talk to her about what happened that summer, to talk through the ramifications of testosterone on a female body, about the fact that it's a one-way street that cannot be reversed, and that we want to make sure that her mental health is addressed first - her response was to completely cut off all contact with all of us.

Two entirely different underlying drivers for their self-declaration of transgenderness, two entirely different psychological profiles. The elder niecephew, by the way, does NOT think that their younger sibling is actually trans either.

 

[Emily Lake]

Mind you, I think bringing up your relationship with your own kids in support of some argument on an internet forum is very inappropriate.

And this matters because... ? Do you think that what you think is inappropriate has much bearing on anyone else?

 

[Emily Lake]

I am as baffled by your description of me as an "ivory tower"

You know... this is something that's been leveled at you repeatedly by a large number of forumites over the course of many years. I view you as an ivory tower academic too. You've objected to that description, but IIRC, when you did so you appealed to you not being wealthy and teaching at a community college. This suggests to me that you don't actually understand the idiom. In this context, it means that your entire approach is coming from the philosophical position of an academic, divorced from real-world considerations of the practicality and impacts once you take the theoretical and try to make it applied.

I think you do this on some topics, but not consistently. There are others who are far more divorced from the real world than you. And on some topics you might be more pragmatic than me

 

[Emily Lake]

The younger is a gay not queer, lesbian who doesn’t do dick

I’d be surprised if she did dick.

How bad a day do you want to have? Go look into the Cotton Ceiling. There's a not-insignificant amount of pressure for lesbians to have sex with "ladydicks" from males who identify as transwomen.

Hell, just a few years ago, we have a case of one of our very own forum members expressing the opinion that if a lesbian outright rejects having sex with bepenised 'women', then those lesbians are bigots who have a genital fetish.

 

[Emily Lake]

Well Jimmy’s not to be taken seriously, so it’s all fine.

Jimmy has his moments, on the whole he's a good dude. Honestly, most of the posters here are.

 

[Emily Lake]

Mind you, I think bringing up your relationship with your own kids in support of some argument on an internet forum is very inappropriate.

He brought them up as evidence that he has some real life experience on the subject.

As opposed to you ivory tower activists who "just know" because you read about it in a book by an author you just know is an expert.
Tom

Wow. So you think that academics live in ivory towers? Wow.

Again... that's not what the phrase means.

 

[Politesse]

I am as baffled by your description of me as an "ivory tower"

You know... this is something that's been leveled at you repeatedly by a large number of forumites over the course of many years. I view you as an ivory tower academic too. You've objected to that description, but IIRC, when you did so you appealed to you not being wealthy and teaching at a community college. This suggests to me that you don't actually understand the idiom. In this context, it means that your entire approach is coming from the philosophical position of an academic, divorced from real-world considerations of the practicality and impacts once you take the theoretical and try to make it applied.

I think you do this on some topics, but not consistently. There are others who are far more divorced from the real world than you. And on some topics you might be more pragmatic than me

There are plenty of people in the "real world" who aren't bigots. And I don't see how your attempts to use the law as a weapon to abuse trans children with are an "academic" question anyway. Human beings are not theories. The impact of your rhetoric on their lives are not hypothetical. Their lives, their minds, their bodies, are no less real than yours. Juvenile hall does not build walls with textbook paper, but with cheap cement and plaster like anywhere else. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my life, my experiences, the people I know and care about, are far, far more real than the bogeyman-infested world your social media landscape has painted for you.

 

[Emily Lake]

Well Jimmy’s not to be taken seriously, so it’s all fine.

I generally think Jimmy Higgins has a good head on his shoulders.

Well he’s displayed a commonplace, casual, misogynistic failure to consider this issue in any depth.

As evidenced by his contributions.

You apparently didn't read my posts, but that is okay. I get that you aren't here to actually converse, but rather to disseminate.

Disagree. I think seanie is arguing (none of us are conversing), not disseminating. Sometimes a bit scattershot about it, and likely confusing who he's arguing with, but still arguing.

Honestly, still don't know if seanie is male or female, but also doesn't matter unless pronouns wound his or her entire psyche. Which I rather suspect they don't.

 

[Emily Lake]

"Transgenders" are like "illegal immigrants" and "dangerous vaccines". A problem that is being concocted to distract some of the public.

Male bovine excrement. The problem transgenders cause women is not concocted.

It is the later 21st century "gay agenda".

Teen/college aged girls need to worry a million times more about drugs being slipped into their drink, being encouraged to get drunk, manipulated/pressured by straight males for sex than a transgender beating them in an athletic event or attacking them in a locker room. That doesn't mean the later isn't a risk, but rather it is a much smaller risk that people like you are being so easily triggered to go all foamy at the mouth over.

Look, I get that there's an aspect of this that you don't get and haven't experienced, and that you may not have even paused to consider it. You're a man - and that's fine. But let's get real here.

You're a guy, and you know guys. So give this a think. Of all of the guys you knew when you were in middle school - even the ones you disliked - how many of them would have wanted to peep on the girls in the showers? What portion of the guys you knew in middle school and high school would happily have peeped if they thought there was no chance of them getting caught?

Now rub some modernity on it. Think about those same guys, but add an additional avenue of socially approved peeping. What if the only thing they had to do was put on a skirt and maybe some cherry chapstick... and say they were trans? What if, by doing so, they would be given the *right* to go into the girl's showers while the girls are in there naked? What if they knew that the school administrators would protect them in that venture? What if they knew that the school administrators and a horde of activists would call all of the girls bigots and transphobes if those girls objected to the presence of a male-bodied teenager in the space where they were naked?

Do you think that girls and women have no right to refuse to let a man look at them naked? Or do you think consent matters?

 

[Emily Lake]

Teen/college aged girls need to worry a million times more about drugs being slipped into their drink, being encouraged to get drunk, manipulated/pressured by straight males for sex than a transgender beating them in an athletic event or attacking them in a locker room. That doesn't mean the later isn't a risk, but rather it is a much smaller risk that people like you are being so easily triggered to go all foamy at the mouth over.

Teen/college girls also worry about their sports opportunities being forfeit to mediocre male athletes, their college scholarships given to males and a whole slew of other problems as life progresses.

No, they don't. They almost exclusively have to worry about other female talents they compete against.

HeCheated.org

A Record of Male Athletes in Female Sport

hecheated.org

 

[Politesse]

It's funny how these people claim to be speaking for "science", but also despise "academia" and the college system. Almost as though the thing they are calling science is... not, in recognizable sense, science. If your ideology abhors the scrutiny of the scienitific community, a science it is not, but is simply a belief among beliefs.

 

[Politesse]

What "victims"? You can fuck right off with that malicious, cruel, and malign rhetoric.

The minority class targeted by your "liberal" political activities.

 

[Politesse]

And at what fucking point did grown men become "innocent children" who need the safety and fairness of women's spaces and sports?

Your anti-trans bullshit may affect some adult men and women, but the majority of your victims are and will always be underage, as underage people are far more vulnerable to social abuse and alienation, being unable to hide their condition and can make few if any decisions about where they live or what institutions they must attend. When you pass laws attacking trans people, adult trans people can hide. Children can't.

 

[Emily Lake]

"Transgenders" are like "illegal immigrants" and "dangerous vaccines". A problem that is being concocted to distract some of the public.

Male bovine excrement. The problem transgenders cause women is not concocted.

The problem caused to women is real, but I don't think transgendered people are the cause. Self-centered entitled jerks are the cause. And an unprincipled and aggressive new religion is the cause of the cause. Gender dysphoria doesn't cause men to believe they have the newly concocted right to bring penises into penis-free spaces, or punch female boxers in the face, without regard to whether the impacted women consent to it. An ideology that lumps individuals into arbitrary categories, ranks those categories on a stack, and tells people what their rights to do to other people are, based not on any principle but on who is higher up on the stack, is what causes men to believe this and turns them into self-centered entitled jerks. I don't know how to measure the incidence of self-centered entitled jerks in the trans population, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that the majority of male transgendered people are decent human beings who understand that having a problem doesn't magically give you the right to make it someone else's problem -- decent human beings who respect women's boundaries and stay out of women's sports and women's bathrooms if they don't have women's consent.

There are actually a fair number of non-entitled transgender identified males out there. There are perhaps a dozen that I interact with regularly, albeit most are on social media. One of them had a tag-line that resonated well: "I don't identify as a woman, I identify with women".

Of those that I interact with, including my niecephew, is that they are all aware that they remain male no matter what they do. And all of them - including my niecephew - are respectful toward women. Some of them will use female restrooms others don't, but none of them will use female showers or changing rooms, or other spaces where women are naked or particularly vulnerable.

 

[Emily Lake]

Nope. Any policy that prevents a trans who has undergone a complete transformation is hurtful.

Tell you what - you come up with a way to allow males who have had penectomies, orchiectomies, vaginoplasties, tracheal shaving, electrolysis or laser hair removal, exogenous estrogen supplements, and whatever else you want to toss into the bag of "complete transformation" into female spaces while ALSO excluding males who have NOT had all of those things OUT... then we can talk.

Because right now, you're effectively arguing for policies that allow ALL MEN OF ANY SORT into female spaces. Come up with a reliable way to sort them out, a way without giant gaping loopholes, and maybe we can make some progress on this topic.

 

[Emily Lake]

Why are you invested in the belief sex is binary?

I'm invested in the "belief" that sex is binary in the same way that I'm invested in the "belief" that gravity is an attractive force, that the earth is an oblate spheroid, and that photosynthesis turns light into energy.

Your cult members would be proud.

I honestly don't know how to feel about you characterizing gravity, round earth, and photosynthesis as a cult.

 

[Emily Lake]

I am as baffled by your description of me as an "ivory tower"

You know... this is something that's been leveled at you repeatedly by a large number of forumites over the course of many years. I view you as an ivory tower academic too. You've objected to that description, but IIRC, when you did so you appealed to you not being wealthy and teaching at a community college. This suggests to me that you don't actually understand the idiom. In this context, it means that your entire approach is coming from the philosophical position of an academic, divorced from real-world considerations of the practicality and impacts once you take the theoretical and try to make it applied.

I think you do this on some topics, but not consistently. There are others who are far more divorced from the real world than you. And on some topics you might be more pragmatic than me

There are plenty of people in the "real world" who aren't bigots. And I don't see how your attempts to use the law as a weapon to abuse trans children with are an "academic" question anyway. Human beings are not theories. The impact of your rhetoric on their lives are not hypothetical. Their lives, their minds, their bodies, are no less real than yours. Juvenile hall does not build walls with textbook paper, but with cheap cement and plaster like anywhere else. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my life, my experiences, the people I know and care about, are far, far more real than the bogeyman-infested world your social media landscape has painted for you.

You sure do complain about other people not being nice while simultaneously being an utter asshole.

Nobody wants to use the law as a weapon to abuse trans children. GTFOH with that bullshit. What I do actually want is to protect children from exploitative adults and ideological zealots who have absolutely no concern at all for the long term impacts of their "affirmation". I very strongly object to medical intervention in minors for the purpose of changing their still-developing bodies. Once they're adults, if they wish to pursue such alterations I have no objection to them having the right to do whatever they wish to their own body.

But children should NOT be given puberty blockers unless they actually have precocious puberty - and in that situation they should ONLY be given blockers until their adrenal process kicks off. The entire point of GnRH agonists is to bring the pituitary and the adrenal processes into alignment so the child avoids deleterious long term outcomes. And children should NOT be given cross-sex hormones during puberty, as doing so causes long-term permanent harm to them, and can result in permanent sterility. And children should NOT be given surgeries to alter their still-developing bodies and rob them of the CHOICE of future fertility.

Adults should NOT be in the business of locking children into a permanently medicalized pathway that CAUSES physical harm. It's as abominable to me as lobotomies and recovered memories. It's as appalling to me as pro-ana activists. Because it CREATES harm.