I think it is reasonable for Plural to ask you for your proposed "rule". And we should be suspicious if our rule does not seem to do the right things in all the right circumstances.
I like that you are aiming away from chances of bad actions since I think those rates with respect to bathrooms is very very low. That is not the center of …
I think it is reasonable for Plural to ask you for your proposed "rule". And we should be suspicious if our rule does not seem to do the right things in all the right circumstances.
I like that you are aiming away from chances of bad actions since I think those rates with respect to bathrooms is very very low. That is not the center of this issue. As you point out, it seems at center is how women FEEL about folks being in their space.
I generally find myself on the same side of this issue as you are. But I am UNCOMFORTABLE. The kind of rule that I imagine us gravitating towards has something to do with many folks being uncomfortable with the situation. But white of the past (or maybe present) could LEGITIMATELY argue that they were uncomfortable in the close presents of blacks. Even as we accept the truth of that, we basically tell them to "get over it"
so I just find myself confused.
And @Mark Monday if this conflation hard to read (I am not happy with it either), then can you slice them apart in a morally strong way? I at least for the moment can't.
"I think it is reasonable for Plural to ask you for your proposed 'rule'."
Where does he ask me for a "rule"? And with regards to women's spaces, why would he even need to ask me for a rule? Is there any man who is unclear about the criteria by which he's excluded from women's spaces?
And *please* tell me why white people of the past could legitimately argue that they were uncomfortable in the close presence of black people. I promise not to jump down your throat. But I think you're on incredibly shaky ground there.😅
Bathrooms are not at the centre of the issue. In fact, when talking about women's spaces, I rarely mention them. Because they're the one space that I think is segregated by gender expression far more than sex. In my experience talking about this issue, bathrooms are by far the least controversial (though still controversial for some) women's space.
Communal changing rooms, prisons, rape crisis centres, these kinds of spaces have always been segregated by sex. And it's understandable why women would be uncomfortable with men in those spaces in a sense that I see absolutely no way to compare to black people and white people. I'm all ears though.
People conflate race with the class issue. I live in a neighbourhood full of people who look like me and don't look like me, and while we've had some crime here I've never felt unsafe. When I was scouting 'hoods many years ago I applied my usual tests - What condition are their cars? How well do they dress (not fancy/expensive, just clean, basic decent clothes).
Class is what's important, or just basic decent appearance and minding one's own business. Poor, drug-ridden, criminal white people are just as scary as their darker similar brethren and sistren.
Absolutely. As I pointed out to Plural, most communities are segregated by poverty. If you just cast your eye over some communities, this is easy to mistake for segregation by race. There are many reasons for this. Racism among them. But it's both silly and unproductive to pretend that racism is the sole factor.
If you go back upstream to the origin of all this wokeism it comes from the logic of Critical Theory that cultural norms aren’t based on immutable truths, they’re based on the preferences of those at the top of the power hierarchy. Of course, from the evolutionary perspective there is some truth in that and people growing up in the modern worldview know it. This is why well-intentioned people tend to accept the premise of questioning the validity of every received cultural norm; it makes some sense to ask for “rules”. Cultural norms do change over time.
The problem with Critical Theory is that if everything is relative then so are the claims of Critical Theory. It’s just fancy nihilism. But it is a sort of logical predicament. The only way forward is to embrace the idea of progress in finding first principles for ordering society.
And yes, they are our preferences, and we do have to defend some cultural norms as better than others. So yes, we simply have to state that our culture has learned that women need protections from people with testosterone. We no longer accept slavery as normal. Women should have the right to vote. The law should be applied equally. Etc. That list will eventually get into grey areas, but the way forward is not to destroy the culture we are trying to improve.
"If you go back upstream to the origin of all this wokeism it comes from the logic of Critical Theory that cultural norms aren’t based on immutable truths"
Absolutely. Not only that, but cultural norms and the categories they're based on are all simply means of exerting "power" and should be torn down at every opportunity.
But is a woman exerting power over me when she asks me to stay out of her changing room or rape crisis centre? I don't think so. And if she is, I accept it gladly.
A characteristic I unfailingly find in people who espouse critical theory style arguments is a blind narcissism that presumes that they should always be able to do whatever they want. Even if it requires other people to change the entire way they see the world.
"Oh, you're uncomfortable with me getting my penis out in front of you and your daughter in a female changing room? Well, you're just a bigot. You need to change the way you think."
I actually saw somebody make the claim that women who don't want males in their spaces because they've been raped should "reframe their trauma" (https://thecritic.co.uk/reframe-your-trauma/). It's narcissism all the way down. And the extremists really don't care how much damage they do as long as they get their way.
Relativism is toxic. We should meet every new assertion of it with skepticism and demands for evidence.
I've seen enough of it to confidently claim that relativism is associated with sickness. In all but the most scoundrelous it has neutered conviction; we are forbidden to make even the most unambiguous value judgments lest we sound "just like the religious right."
I had a coworker who could not utter a sentence that didn't include "from [my | your | his | their...] perspective"; we were developing software and this added nothing to any discussion. One day I asked him privately to stop saying it. He instantly became a savagely nasty enemy and did everything he could manage to get me in trouble on the job.
This guy was a mess. At 5'10" he could not have weighed more than 110 lbs and he pulled all-nighters with a sack of candy bars. I could see the bones of his eye sockets if he stood under the lighting, something I had only seen before in people near death from AIDS or cancer.
The intensity of his hatred of me was just shocking. Just because I asked him to stop adding "from my perspective" to every sentence. It was really critical to his Weltanschauung.
I just had some guy on Facebook tell me that one in 120 is "trans." Medical criteria say one in 65,000. This is way way out of control. Even going to gay clubs in Norfolk where the gay scene was completely centered on transvestites the ratio was lower than that.
Unfortunately, idiocies rarely collapse under the weight of their absurdity.
I've got some chick on Twitter claiming to be a scientist and a Ph.D. arguing with me that we're not a two-gendered species because other species aren't and bonobos, I don't know, behave homosexually or something. And I'm like, yeah, but none of them, to our knowledge, have ever exhibited 'trans' behaviour. She think it's *all* GD, I think it's *mostly* ROGD.
Oh, I doubt the doctorate. And the scientist shtick.
When I read someone saying that there are really 78 genders I usually just click block. A lot of fanatics are saying that developmental defects like X0 and XYY are genders. That is crazy.
I really hope the backlash coming from places like Netflix picks up momentum. It's really chilling that even soldiers are being put through sensitivity training for "they."
You might be right about the doctorate, I think she doesn't have it yet. I'll look more closely when I get on Twitter later this morning, but you can't always tell a lot from a Twitter bio. OTOH, she uses her real name.
The problem is science has become tainted by this crap. Not so much because the real scientists are bending to this nonsense, but because they're under attack whenever they publish a paper or a study that contradicts gender ideology. The other day I read a study supposedly 'refuting' Lisa Littman's multiply-peer-reviewed research on the rise of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and at least one of the lead authors was an LGBT etc. proponent. I didn't have time to check the creds of the psychiatrist quoted as another contributing author but I'll bet he's LGBT-connected too. I did say to this Twitter woman that she can't be much of a scientist if she can't tell the difference between a boy and a girl.
What I'm still trying to figure out is the underlying agenda with the activists, so insistent on going into the schools to screw up and seemingly 'recruit' childeren, along with the insistence that you have to hurry and get them on damaging blockers et al before, they, I don't know, grow up and change their minds? Or just have a few talks with Mommy & Daddy and realize they shouldn't waste headspace on those crazy people in dresses? There was an interesting article at The Federalist (not my fave right-wing source, not factual enough) about the medical/healthcare Big Money behind gender transitioning but it looked very good, with lots of links to respectable sources. So I think the medical profession is happy to generate new lifelong dependent patients on them early, but I don't think that explains activist mania. There's something else going on underneath and I haven't figured it out yet - nor, possibly, has anyone else.
The signs are early that the backlash is coming, and Netflix is one of the first shots back across the bow. The reference to Lia Thomas throughout an article as 'he' and 'him' I found a few months ago on a news site is another. The closure of the Tavistock Clinic in the UK is another good sign (they got sued by a patient who grew up and realized she should never have been put on puberty blockers at sixteen). We need to see the revolution hit social media, though, where too many people are being banned because they dare to question the gender nazis. I'm keeping an eye out for if there's ever a public fuss about Medium - you can be sure I'll be there tweeting and commenting my own experience - along with (now outdated) article Too Hot For Medium :)
Correction on the Twitter chick I'm talking to: She doesn't claim to be a scientist or a Ph.D. in her bio; I looked at it more closely. She's an Australian mom who is a 'science consultant' with a 'Ph.D in computer games', clearly meant humorously. I *have* been hitting her on the science angle.
Medium is the worst. I got it again ... same "Roger (he/him)" only this time my offense was nothing worse than advising a father to not be too hasty with the hormones and surgery for his newly-announced "trans" son, since it's a lot more likely that he's gay, not "trans."
Wow! I occasionally say "in my opinion" when I wish to make clear that I don't think my thought is truth from the lips of God, but in normal speech opinion is implicit. I guess I've been privileged to not have people openly hate me in the workplace.
First Fit: I agree with much of what you are saying, but consider the phrase: "the way forward is to not destroy the culture we are trying to improve"
Ok, but notice that on the issue of women's suffrage, and slave rights on indeed WAS destroying a culture when this progress occurred. So it remains to define "good vs bad" destruction.
It seems plausible to me that a generation or two hence the roles of gender end up so blurred that this male / female dichotomy is no longer the dominate way of thinking... then such rules would look antequated. Of course this could only happen if the actual risks of sexual assault were very nearly zero -- which I think is plausible with a bit of technology.
My point is before a cultural shift has occurred, one can genuinely argue that the shift will kill something essential within the current culture. So if we want to declare some of these shifts as progress, while others are not progress, we still are stuck defining this.
and @ChrisFox I say the same to your relativeism is toxic comment. I don't disagree, but the only defense against relativism is some non-relative rule that one can stand behind. What is the rule we are standing behind here? I am having difficulty articulatinig it!
"So if we want to declare some of these shifts as progress, while others are not progress, we still are stuck defining this."
I think this is usually very easy to do though:
Will this change create more or less human suffering? Does this allow more people to live in safety and dignity?
Not always, but in the vast majority of cases, the answer to these questions is self-evident. In the case of slavery, a few people were financially worse off after slavery ended. But millions of people were free to live lives as human beings. It would have been even better if the government had followed through on the promises made to freed slaves so they didn't starve to death.
As I said to plural, if we make all spaces gender neutral, nothing improves for ordinary, decent men. Rapists and perverts are happier, and pretty much every single women is less happy and feels less safe.
I think you might be right about the male/female dichotomy becoming "antiquated" in people's thinking. I guess it just depends on how much more rape and sexual harassment we deem acceptable. Because human nature doesn't care about progressive thinking. Abolishing the categories of male and female will lead to exactly the same problems it caused 100 or 1000 years ago.
I'm curious how you think technology cut cut the risk of sexual assault to nearly zero.
In principle I see and maybe even support your approach, but in practice I can't see how to make it workable. (Remember, I am confused on this, so I have no alternative to propose)
But my problem is, likely the number of actual assults that would occur as a result of trans in women's bathrooms is likely pretty small. Thus if we argue an material safety grounds we would need to band friday night football, co-ed classes, and many many other things first.
Thus the only angle is to say that is MENTALLY hurts all women to be thus exposed. That is the better argument, but human expectations and subjective measures of risk are massively malleable. Black slaves worked with their hands and backs all day, they were coarse and powerful. I expect whites of both genders really did have visceral fear in their presence (especially since these slaves had been wronged all of their lives in brutal ways. Thus brutality was known to them.) Thus I expect it was really true that whites would easily have MORE fear in close presence with such a slave, even more than the average women might have for her safety when in a bathroom with a trans woman.
But we don't want that white persons fear to be a justification for separation. Even in todays world one could argue for separation of public spaces by gender on this basis.
I feel any honest application of such a rule would end up outlawing alot of things that we would be uncomfortable with before it would outlaw trans in women's bathroom.
"likely the number of actual assults that would occur as a result of trans in women's bathrooms is likely pretty small."
Two things here, first, the widespread mistake of treating sexual assault as the only reason to keep males out of female spaces. If I stand in a female space naked, with an erection, but don't assault anybody, do women still have a right to complain? If women feel so uncomfortable that they're driven out of spaces built for them, do they have a right to complain? I think yes.
Secondly, even where we're talking specifically about assault, we're talking about *additional* assaults. Yes, women face dangers from men in many spaces. And anything we can do to reduce that is great. But if we abolish women's spaces, we're weighing additional assaults against 50% of the population against assaults against <1% of the population who are actually less vulnerable to sexual violence and its consequences (retain some strength advantages, can't get pregnant, may not even have a vagina).
And yes, antebellum white people had good reason to be uncomfortable around black people. But a) attacks on white people were still vanishingly rare, and brutally and disproportionately punished. And b) as you say, those reasons were almost entirely based on the cruelty those white people inflicted on slaves.
You're glossing over the vastly different reasons *why* those fears might exist, to arrive at something approximating, "all segregation is basically the same." No, it really, really isn't.
If women were uncomfortable around men because they'd stolen us from our homes and forced us and our children to work to death for them, we'd be having a very different conversation.
But any "honest application" of a rule regarding sex-based segregation is necessarily sex-based. I see no way to "honestly apply" a rule about racial segregation without being honest about why it's even an issue. You haven't been honest about that here.
> Two things here, first, the widespread mistake of treating sexual assault as the only reason to keep males out of female spaces. If I stand in a female space naked,
We agree, indeed as I wrote, I already stated that your better argument is about the discomfort women would have. So lets just focus on that sub-area that we both agree with as the key one.
> You're glossing over the vastly different reasons *why* those fears might exist,
No I am not. Recall I am 'confused' about a valid 'rule' here, I am simply noting a parallel situation. If you believe there is a valid rule that separates these two casese you are free to use any aspect of these situations in order to craft your rule. I am open to hearing it.
> But any "honest application" of a rule regarding sex-based segregation ... You haven't been honest about that here.
Well let me clarify here. For me the issues is when can one group require exclusion of another group from some communally manged space. I think a good rule should apply broadly to sex-based and non-sex based spaces. It should be a general rule about when exclusion is warranted.
Of course there can be sex-spaced based instances of the general rule, that is not problem. But I am very bothered is we cannot express the principle generally and then instantiated it appropriately for sex spaces. Indeed if we cannot do that, then I fear we are begin parochial and merely justifying prejudices that hold in our present moment. this his the high standard which I cannot see my way towards right now.
You might say, Dan you are holding us to too high of a standard. Perhaps. But I will just notice that down thru history when humanity "was up to no good" and justifying shit that later we would say "what the fuck were they thinking?" We would create specialty rules with specialty justifications for specialty cases. Hence my desire for a generalized rule. Something like:
Humanity is justified in excluding one sub-population from a community managed resource for benefit of another sub-population WHEN ...
I am having difficulty finishing that sentence in a satisfactory way. Can you express this rule in a way that you can stand behind?
"Humanity is justified in excluding one sub-population from a community managed resource for benefit of another sub-population WHEN ..."
I just realised I didn't actually answer this question. I'll start by saying that I don't think a generalised rule is necessary. Justification for exclusion will always require grey areas and careful, case-by-case thinking. But generally speaking, my answer would be:
WHEN one sub-population, by nature, poses a measurable threat to the safety of the other sub-population. Especially when the exclusion doesn't in any way harm the first sub-population.
The "by nature" clause is important because as we discussed above, if you've mistreated a population for years, and they bear some malice towards you because of that, it's not their fault. That's not by nature, It's because of your cruelty. There are measurable, natural differences between males and females. Still waiting for any corollary between black people and white people.
As I mentioned in the other reply, given the aforementioned cruelty, racial segregation would probably have been absolutely fine with most black people. The only reason it wasn't, is because it actively harmed black people (failing the second clause of my "rule"). Both in the inferior standard of facilities available to them, and the massive head starts white people had in society with regards to education, land, infrastructure, wealth, and opportunity.
Level out those playing fields and I think plenty of black people would have argued for racial segregation just as strongly as any KKK member. Mainly because of the threat white people posed to *black* people's safety.
"Recall I am 'confused' about a valid 'rule' here, I am simply noting a parallel situation."
I'm just really struggling to take your "confusion" seriously though Dan. Are you able to articulate the difference between a man and a woman? Or not even articulate it. Are you clear, just on an instinctive, observational level, about the differences between male and female bodies? If so, there's your "rule." If not, you're lagging behind most children who, at three-months-old, can already tell the difference.
Again, there is no parallel. The difference between black and white humans is literally skin deep. Because "black" and "white" are such broad, blurry categories. The difference between males and females is not. And again, we're not even talking about segregation in the racial segregation sense. Male facilities really are "separate but equal." If black/white facilities had *actually* been separate but equal, if black people were left unmolested by white people to lead their lives, if they'd been given what they were promised as compensation for their work during slavery, there'd have been far less opposition to racial segregation.
I suspect, given some of the arguments you made over the past few months, that deep down you believe that there's more to it than this. That there's some fundamental cognitive or genetic difference between dark skinned humans and light skinned humans. You seem uncomfortable admitting it in so many words, because most people will label you a racist and yell at you, but your arguments suggest very strongly that you still believe it.
But if my suspicions are correct, then you're wrong. And to see why you're wrong, all you need to do is seriously try to articulate the differences. Articulating them for males and females is easy. What are the "parallel" differences between black people and white people? What positives and negatives came from ending racial segregation? What are the "parallel" positives and negatives that would come from abolishing single-sex spaces?
I don't think you've thought about these questions very carefully, either from a "black" point of view or a female point of view.
What motivates such an odd idea, doing away with the dichtomoy of male and female. It's not as though this is some invented difference, whatever the postmodernists say. Men and women are distinctly different and the difference that matters most here is that women are more vulnerable.
We should be focusing on erasing the wage gap between men and women, lowering the incidence of rape and domestic violence, tangible and achievable goals, not this "woke" crap.
This is very much a side point, whIch I probably should not have raised, since the core of my argument rests on the fact that presently the absolute rates are low even w/o technology.
Still, now that I raised it.... I can imagine building deep learned models of struggle based on audio finger print and near IR visual signature. Such a edge device would be entirely on chip (like an occupancy sensor, or auto door opener technology today. (So no information leaves the device itself which is mounted in the ceiling.) But this device can 'phone home' if a felony might be is in progress. One would need to get the false positive rate down very low, else the police would not respond. Still I expect it would be pretty hard to "get away" with rape if the police could get there in minutes.
I think the loss of privacy is not much different than having an occupancy sensor automatically turn on the light when you enter the room. (Assuming it only phones home when actual felonies are in progress, and one is not concerned with maintaining privacy of felonies in progress.)
I think it is reasonable for Plural to ask you for your proposed "rule". And we should be suspicious if our rule does not seem to do the right things in all the right circumstances.
I like that you are aiming away from chances of bad actions since I think those rates with respect to bathrooms is very very low. That is not the center of this issue. As you point out, it seems at center is how women FEEL about folks being in their space.
I generally find myself on the same side of this issue as you are. But I am UNCOMFORTABLE. The kind of rule that I imagine us gravitating towards has something to do with many folks being uncomfortable with the situation. But white of the past (or maybe present) could LEGITIMATELY argue that they were uncomfortable in the close presents of blacks. Even as we accept the truth of that, we basically tell them to "get over it"
so I just find myself confused.
And @Mark Monday if this conflation hard to read (I am not happy with it either), then can you slice them apart in a morally strong way? I at least for the moment can't.
"I think it is reasonable for Plural to ask you for your proposed 'rule'."
Where does he ask me for a "rule"? And with regards to women's spaces, why would he even need to ask me for a rule? Is there any man who is unclear about the criteria by which he's excluded from women's spaces?
And *please* tell me why white people of the past could legitimately argue that they were uncomfortable in the close presence of black people. I promise not to jump down your throat. But I think you're on incredibly shaky ground there.😅
Bathrooms are not at the centre of the issue. In fact, when talking about women's spaces, I rarely mention them. Because they're the one space that I think is segregated by gender expression far more than sex. In my experience talking about this issue, bathrooms are by far the least controversial (though still controversial for some) women's space.
Communal changing rooms, prisons, rape crisis centres, these kinds of spaces have always been segregated by sex. And it's understandable why women would be uncomfortable with men in those spaces in a sense that I see absolutely no way to compare to black people and white people. I'm all ears though.
People conflate race with the class issue. I live in a neighbourhood full of people who look like me and don't look like me, and while we've had some crime here I've never felt unsafe. When I was scouting 'hoods many years ago I applied my usual tests - What condition are their cars? How well do they dress (not fancy/expensive, just clean, basic decent clothes).
Class is what's important, or just basic decent appearance and minding one's own business. Poor, drug-ridden, criminal white people are just as scary as their darker similar brethren and sistren.
Absolutely. As I pointed out to Plural, most communities are segregated by poverty. If you just cast your eye over some communities, this is easy to mistake for segregation by race. There are many reasons for this. Racism among them. But it's both silly and unproductive to pretend that racism is the sole factor.
If you go back upstream to the origin of all this wokeism it comes from the logic of Critical Theory that cultural norms aren’t based on immutable truths, they’re based on the preferences of those at the top of the power hierarchy. Of course, from the evolutionary perspective there is some truth in that and people growing up in the modern worldview know it. This is why well-intentioned people tend to accept the premise of questioning the validity of every received cultural norm; it makes some sense to ask for “rules”. Cultural norms do change over time.
The problem with Critical Theory is that if everything is relative then so are the claims of Critical Theory. It’s just fancy nihilism. But it is a sort of logical predicament. The only way forward is to embrace the idea of progress in finding first principles for ordering society.
And yes, they are our preferences, and we do have to defend some cultural norms as better than others. So yes, we simply have to state that our culture has learned that women need protections from people with testosterone. We no longer accept slavery as normal. Women should have the right to vote. The law should be applied equally. Etc. That list will eventually get into grey areas, but the way forward is not to destroy the culture we are trying to improve.
"If you go back upstream to the origin of all this wokeism it comes from the logic of Critical Theory that cultural norms aren’t based on immutable truths"
Absolutely. Not only that, but cultural norms and the categories they're based on are all simply means of exerting "power" and should be torn down at every opportunity.
But is a woman exerting power over me when she asks me to stay out of her changing room or rape crisis centre? I don't think so. And if she is, I accept it gladly.
A characteristic I unfailingly find in people who espouse critical theory style arguments is a blind narcissism that presumes that they should always be able to do whatever they want. Even if it requires other people to change the entire way they see the world.
"Oh, you're uncomfortable with me getting my penis out in front of you and your daughter in a female changing room? Well, you're just a bigot. You need to change the way you think."
I actually saw somebody make the claim that women who don't want males in their spaces because they've been raped should "reframe their trauma" (https://thecritic.co.uk/reframe-your-trauma/). It's narcissism all the way down. And the extremists really don't care how much damage they do as long as they get their way.
"And the extremists really don't care how much damage they do as long as they get their way."
Lot of that going around lately.
Relativism is toxic. We should meet every new assertion of it with skepticism and demands for evidence.
I've seen enough of it to confidently claim that relativism is associated with sickness. In all but the most scoundrelous it has neutered conviction; we are forbidden to make even the most unambiguous value judgments lest we sound "just like the religious right."
I had a coworker who could not utter a sentence that didn't include "from [my | your | his | their...] perspective"; we were developing software and this added nothing to any discussion. One day I asked him privately to stop saying it. He instantly became a savagely nasty enemy and did everything he could manage to get me in trouble on the job.
"neutered conviction"--- precisely!
That goes to the heart of the matter. Generating controversy that contributes nothing to a work related issue should not be tolerated.
This guy was a mess. At 5'10" he could not have weighed more than 110 lbs and he pulled all-nighters with a sack of candy bars. I could see the bones of his eye sockets if he stood under the lighting, something I had only seen before in people near death from AIDS or cancer.
The intensity of his hatred of me was just shocking. Just because I asked him to stop adding "from my perspective" to every sentence. It was really critical to his Weltanschauung.
Apparently Netflix recently told 'woke' employees that if they can't handle 'offensive' content, maybe Netflix isn't the best place for them to work.
I'm definitely seeing the beginnings of pushback in the corporate world re this 'woke' nonsense.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/13/netflix-tells-woke-workers-to-quit-if-they-are-offended-culture-memo/
I just had some guy on Facebook tell me that one in 120 is "trans." Medical criteria say one in 65,000. This is way way out of control. Even going to gay clubs in Norfolk where the gay scene was completely centered on transvestites the ratio was lower than that.
Unfortunately, idiocies rarely collapse under the weight of their absurdity.
I've got some chick on Twitter claiming to be a scientist and a Ph.D. arguing with me that we're not a two-gendered species because other species aren't and bonobos, I don't know, behave homosexually or something. And I'm like, yeah, but none of them, to our knowledge, have ever exhibited 'trans' behaviour. She think it's *all* GD, I think it's *mostly* ROGD.
Oh, I doubt the doctorate. And the scientist shtick.
When I read someone saying that there are really 78 genders I usually just click block. A lot of fanatics are saying that developmental defects like X0 and XYY are genders. That is crazy.
I really hope the backlash coming from places like Netflix picks up momentum. It's really chilling that even soldiers are being put through sensitivity training for "they."
You might be right about the doctorate, I think she doesn't have it yet. I'll look more closely when I get on Twitter later this morning, but you can't always tell a lot from a Twitter bio. OTOH, she uses her real name.
The problem is science has become tainted by this crap. Not so much because the real scientists are bending to this nonsense, but because they're under attack whenever they publish a paper or a study that contradicts gender ideology. The other day I read a study supposedly 'refuting' Lisa Littman's multiply-peer-reviewed research on the rise of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and at least one of the lead authors was an LGBT etc. proponent. I didn't have time to check the creds of the psychiatrist quoted as another contributing author but I'll bet he's LGBT-connected too. I did say to this Twitter woman that she can't be much of a scientist if she can't tell the difference between a boy and a girl.
What I'm still trying to figure out is the underlying agenda with the activists, so insistent on going into the schools to screw up and seemingly 'recruit' childeren, along with the insistence that you have to hurry and get them on damaging blockers et al before, they, I don't know, grow up and change their minds? Or just have a few talks with Mommy & Daddy and realize they shouldn't waste headspace on those crazy people in dresses? There was an interesting article at The Federalist (not my fave right-wing source, not factual enough) about the medical/healthcare Big Money behind gender transitioning but it looked very good, with lots of links to respectable sources. So I think the medical profession is happy to generate new lifelong dependent patients on them early, but I don't think that explains activist mania. There's something else going on underneath and I haven't figured it out yet - nor, possibly, has anyone else.
The signs are early that the backlash is coming, and Netflix is one of the first shots back across the bow. The reference to Lia Thomas throughout an article as 'he' and 'him' I found a few months ago on a news site is another. The closure of the Tavistock Clinic in the UK is another good sign (they got sued by a patient who grew up and realized she should never have been put on puberty blockers at sixteen). We need to see the revolution hit social media, though, where too many people are being banned because they dare to question the gender nazis. I'm keeping an eye out for if there's ever a public fuss about Medium - you can be sure I'll be there tweeting and commenting my own experience - along with (now outdated) article Too Hot For Medium :)
Correction on the Twitter chick I'm talking to: She doesn't claim to be a scientist or a Ph.D. in her bio; I looked at it more closely. She's an Australian mom who is a 'science consultant' with a 'Ph.D in computer games', clearly meant humorously. I *have* been hitting her on the science angle.
Medium is the worst. I got it again ... same "Roger (he/him)" only this time my offense was nothing worse than advising a father to not be too hasty with the hormones and surgery for his newly-announced "trans" son, since it's a lot more likely that he's gay, not "trans."
Wow! I occasionally say "in my opinion" when I wish to make clear that I don't think my thought is truth from the lips of God, but in normal speech opinion is implicit. I guess I've been privileged to not have people openly hate me in the workplace.
First Fit: I agree with much of what you are saying, but consider the phrase: "the way forward is to not destroy the culture we are trying to improve"
Ok, but notice that on the issue of women's suffrage, and slave rights on indeed WAS destroying a culture when this progress occurred. So it remains to define "good vs bad" destruction.
It seems plausible to me that a generation or two hence the roles of gender end up so blurred that this male / female dichotomy is no longer the dominate way of thinking... then such rules would look antequated. Of course this could only happen if the actual risks of sexual assault were very nearly zero -- which I think is plausible with a bit of technology.
My point is before a cultural shift has occurred, one can genuinely argue that the shift will kill something essential within the current culture. So if we want to declare some of these shifts as progress, while others are not progress, we still are stuck defining this.
and @ChrisFox I say the same to your relativeism is toxic comment. I don't disagree, but the only defense against relativism is some non-relative rule that one can stand behind. What is the rule we are standing behind here? I am having difficulty articulatinig it!
"So if we want to declare some of these shifts as progress, while others are not progress, we still are stuck defining this."
I think this is usually very easy to do though:
Will this change create more or less human suffering? Does this allow more people to live in safety and dignity?
Not always, but in the vast majority of cases, the answer to these questions is self-evident. In the case of slavery, a few people were financially worse off after slavery ended. But millions of people were free to live lives as human beings. It would have been even better if the government had followed through on the promises made to freed slaves so they didn't starve to death.
As I said to plural, if we make all spaces gender neutral, nothing improves for ordinary, decent men. Rapists and perverts are happier, and pretty much every single women is less happy and feels less safe.
I think you might be right about the male/female dichotomy becoming "antiquated" in people's thinking. I guess it just depends on how much more rape and sexual harassment we deem acceptable. Because human nature doesn't care about progressive thinking. Abolishing the categories of male and female will lead to exactly the same problems it caused 100 or 1000 years ago.
I'm curious how you think technology cut cut the risk of sexual assault to nearly zero.
In principle I see and maybe even support your approach, but in practice I can't see how to make it workable. (Remember, I am confused on this, so I have no alternative to propose)
But my problem is, likely the number of actual assults that would occur as a result of trans in women's bathrooms is likely pretty small. Thus if we argue an material safety grounds we would need to band friday night football, co-ed classes, and many many other things first.
Thus the only angle is to say that is MENTALLY hurts all women to be thus exposed. That is the better argument, but human expectations and subjective measures of risk are massively malleable. Black slaves worked with their hands and backs all day, they were coarse and powerful. I expect whites of both genders really did have visceral fear in their presence (especially since these slaves had been wronged all of their lives in brutal ways. Thus brutality was known to them.) Thus I expect it was really true that whites would easily have MORE fear in close presence with such a slave, even more than the average women might have for her safety when in a bathroom with a trans woman.
But we don't want that white persons fear to be a justification for separation. Even in todays world one could argue for separation of public spaces by gender on this basis.
I feel any honest application of such a rule would end up outlawing alot of things that we would be uncomfortable with before it would outlaw trans in women's bathroom.
Also, you didn't explain how technology could decrease the risk of sexual assault to nearly zero.
"likely the number of actual assults that would occur as a result of trans in women's bathrooms is likely pretty small."
Two things here, first, the widespread mistake of treating sexual assault as the only reason to keep males out of female spaces. If I stand in a female space naked, with an erection, but don't assault anybody, do women still have a right to complain? If women feel so uncomfortable that they're driven out of spaces built for them, do they have a right to complain? I think yes.
Secondly, even where we're talking specifically about assault, we're talking about *additional* assaults. Yes, women face dangers from men in many spaces. And anything we can do to reduce that is great. But if we abolish women's spaces, we're weighing additional assaults against 50% of the population against assaults against <1% of the population who are actually less vulnerable to sexual violence and its consequences (retain some strength advantages, can't get pregnant, may not even have a vagina).
And yes, antebellum white people had good reason to be uncomfortable around black people. But a) attacks on white people were still vanishingly rare, and brutally and disproportionately punished. And b) as you say, those reasons were almost entirely based on the cruelty those white people inflicted on slaves.
You're glossing over the vastly different reasons *why* those fears might exist, to arrive at something approximating, "all segregation is basically the same." No, it really, really isn't.
If women were uncomfortable around men because they'd stolen us from our homes and forced us and our children to work to death for them, we'd be having a very different conversation.
But any "honest application" of a rule regarding sex-based segregation is necessarily sex-based. I see no way to "honestly apply" a rule about racial segregation without being honest about why it's even an issue. You haven't been honest about that here.
> Two things here, first, the widespread mistake of treating sexual assault as the only reason to keep males out of female spaces. If I stand in a female space naked,
We agree, indeed as I wrote, I already stated that your better argument is about the discomfort women would have. So lets just focus on that sub-area that we both agree with as the key one.
> You're glossing over the vastly different reasons *why* those fears might exist,
No I am not. Recall I am 'confused' about a valid 'rule' here, I am simply noting a parallel situation. If you believe there is a valid rule that separates these two casese you are free to use any aspect of these situations in order to craft your rule. I am open to hearing it.
> But any "honest application" of a rule regarding sex-based segregation ... You haven't been honest about that here.
Well let me clarify here. For me the issues is when can one group require exclusion of another group from some communally manged space. I think a good rule should apply broadly to sex-based and non-sex based spaces. It should be a general rule about when exclusion is warranted.
Of course there can be sex-spaced based instances of the general rule, that is not problem. But I am very bothered is we cannot express the principle generally and then instantiated it appropriately for sex spaces. Indeed if we cannot do that, then I fear we are begin parochial and merely justifying prejudices that hold in our present moment. this his the high standard which I cannot see my way towards right now.
You might say, Dan you are holding us to too high of a standard. Perhaps. But I will just notice that down thru history when humanity "was up to no good" and justifying shit that later we would say "what the fuck were they thinking?" We would create specialty rules with specialty justifications for specialty cases. Hence my desire for a generalized rule. Something like:
Humanity is justified in excluding one sub-population from a community managed resource for benefit of another sub-population WHEN ...
I am having difficulty finishing that sentence in a satisfactory way. Can you express this rule in a way that you can stand behind?
"Humanity is justified in excluding one sub-population from a community managed resource for benefit of another sub-population WHEN ..."
I just realised I didn't actually answer this question. I'll start by saying that I don't think a generalised rule is necessary. Justification for exclusion will always require grey areas and careful, case-by-case thinking. But generally speaking, my answer would be:
WHEN one sub-population, by nature, poses a measurable threat to the safety of the other sub-population. Especially when the exclusion doesn't in any way harm the first sub-population.
The "by nature" clause is important because as we discussed above, if you've mistreated a population for years, and they bear some malice towards you because of that, it's not their fault. That's not by nature, It's because of your cruelty. There are measurable, natural differences between males and females. Still waiting for any corollary between black people and white people.
As I mentioned in the other reply, given the aforementioned cruelty, racial segregation would probably have been absolutely fine with most black people. The only reason it wasn't, is because it actively harmed black people (failing the second clause of my "rule"). Both in the inferior standard of facilities available to them, and the massive head starts white people had in society with regards to education, land, infrastructure, wealth, and opportunity.
Level out those playing fields and I think plenty of black people would have argued for racial segregation just as strongly as any KKK member. Mainly because of the threat white people posed to *black* people's safety.
"Recall I am 'confused' about a valid 'rule' here, I am simply noting a parallel situation."
I'm just really struggling to take your "confusion" seriously though Dan. Are you able to articulate the difference between a man and a woman? Or not even articulate it. Are you clear, just on an instinctive, observational level, about the differences between male and female bodies? If so, there's your "rule." If not, you're lagging behind most children who, at three-months-old, can already tell the difference.
Again, there is no parallel. The difference between black and white humans is literally skin deep. Because "black" and "white" are such broad, blurry categories. The difference between males and females is not. And again, we're not even talking about segregation in the racial segregation sense. Male facilities really are "separate but equal." If black/white facilities had *actually* been separate but equal, if black people were left unmolested by white people to lead their lives, if they'd been given what they were promised as compensation for their work during slavery, there'd have been far less opposition to racial segregation.
I suspect, given some of the arguments you made over the past few months, that deep down you believe that there's more to it than this. That there's some fundamental cognitive or genetic difference between dark skinned humans and light skinned humans. You seem uncomfortable admitting it in so many words, because most people will label you a racist and yell at you, but your arguments suggest very strongly that you still believe it.
But if my suspicions are correct, then you're wrong. And to see why you're wrong, all you need to do is seriously try to articulate the differences. Articulating them for males and females is easy. What are the "parallel" differences between black people and white people? What positives and negatives came from ending racial segregation? What are the "parallel" positives and negatives that would come from abolishing single-sex spaces?
I don't think you've thought about these questions very carefully, either from a "black" point of view or a female point of view.
What motivates such an odd idea, doing away with the dichtomoy of male and female. It's not as though this is some invented difference, whatever the postmodernists say. Men and women are distinctly different and the difference that matters most here is that women are more vulnerable.
We should be focusing on erasing the wage gap between men and women, lowering the incidence of rape and domestic violence, tangible and achievable goals, not this "woke" crap.
"Of course this could only happen if the actual risks of sexual assault were very nearly zero -- which I think is plausible with a bit of technology."
This is a very puzzling statement. Are your advocating universal surveillance?
Telescreens?
This is very much a side point, whIch I probably should not have raised, since the core of my argument rests on the fact that presently the absolute rates are low even w/o technology.
Still, now that I raised it.... I can imagine building deep learned models of struggle based on audio finger print and near IR visual signature. Such a edge device would be entirely on chip (like an occupancy sensor, or auto door opener technology today. (So no information leaves the device itself which is mounted in the ceiling.) But this device can 'phone home' if a felony might be is in progress. One would need to get the false positive rate down very low, else the police would not respond. Still I expect it would be pretty hard to "get away" with rape if the police could get there in minutes.
I think the loss of privacy is not much different than having an occupancy sensor automatically turn on the light when you enter the room. (Assuming it only phones home when actual felonies are in progress, and one is not concerned with maintaining privacy of felonies in progress.)