The imbecility goes on: Pseudo-feminists and a new angle?
First they proposed a solution to a nonexistent problem: let’s stop trans women using women’s bathrooms to stop the attacks that have never happened. Ever.
And this week they’re back with another solution to another non existent problem. In an utterly ridiculous post, Roughseasinthemed blathers on about the potential dangers of sharing an all female train compartment with a trans woman. I’d love to know which ones as women only compartments had been abolished in most of Europe by 1977*- which is the year before I was born. Their current existence is limited to highly patriarchal societies, mostly Muslim- but also including places like Japan, Brazil and Mexico where sexual harassment on public transport was endemic.
(*One exception: In April 2016 Mitteldeutsche Regiobahn introduced a voluntary women’s only section on their trains)
And let’s be clear, the sexual harassment isn’t perpetrated by trans-women (who obviously identify as women); it’s perpetrated by men who identify as male and dress accordingly. There’s no way around the fact that what they’re proposing is the same segregation most feminists of the 20th century spent their entire lives fighting.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that segregation isn’t a one way street. If you’ve visited Matho Monastery you know what I mean:
My Mazamet 
The North Carolina Law was a response to a Charlotte city ordinance allowing trans to use the bathroom of their choice. Before that there was no law regarding strange men in dresses using the ladies room, because de minimis non curat lex. So strictly speaking it was Charlotte, not North Carolina, that started the problem where there was none because they wanted to engage in virtue signaling.
North Carolina overreacted like a bunch of ham-fisted rednecks. Then the Federal Government declared that men using the ladies room is a human right and anyone who does not agree that gender is a purely social construct (i.e., me) is the KKK, like a bunch of ham-fisted Maoists.
This flap is about moral preening, whipping up the stupid vote, and figuring out which 51% of the electorate gets to boss around the other 49%. Fuck them all.
On the other hand I finally understand why feminists hate trannies so much, it isn’t that they usurp women’s safe spaces, but that they are always pissing on the seat.
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On the other hand I finally understand why feminists hate trannies so much, it isn’t that they usurp women’s safe spaces, but that they are always pissing on the seat.
I saw a meme about that and thought, “Typcal! Men don’t know a damned thing about womens’ bathrooms.”
That isn’t trannies peeing on the seat. It’s women. They can’t sit on the seat and take the chance of the cooties of the previous seat dweller jumping on their ‘safe zone’. So they pop a squat over the seat, spray everywhere because…aiming is a problem, and then walk away. It’s pretty gross. I don’t use a public toilet except in extreme emergencies.
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well, it’s some women who are so paranoid that they can’t bear to have their “pure” self touch the seat or wipe up after themselves. sheesh.
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I should have qualified my statement to “some” women. It’s still pretty disgusting. Gah!
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But we’re not just talking about the laws themselves. The part you left out of the equation is that the same groups who used to fundraise and make a profit on anti-gay/anti-gay-marriage propaganda, have now shifted all of their efforts into creating this new *battle*. “Alliance Defending Freedom” in particular, seems to be going all out on this new crusade. They were behind the majority of these bathroom bills.
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And do you imagine and the LGTetc activist groups are pure as the wind driven snow?
Sometimes I wonder if the groups are not in collusion.
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Not pure as snow; the difference is one side is fighting for people to have rights and the other is fighting to limit rights.
Legalizations open the door to the right to choice and autonomy. Prohibitions on the other hand are always totalitarian impositions.
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You’re generalization is simplistic, prohibitions are not always totalitarian.
You also give too much credit to your allies further left of you. They are motivated by a rather simplistic notion that gender is a purely social construct, and that all social constructs limit the infinite choices that ought to be available to the individual, and therefore they need to be removed. This is a dumb philosophy and it leads to dumb conclusions like the ones we are seeing today, that men in dresses have a constitutional right to pee on the seat in the ladies room.
The other side is motivated by fear: if the ideological dingbats who believe this garbage are willing to use the force of government to stuff it down our throats, then we had better act now to throw up as many legal obstacles as possible to their plans and drag out the fight in the courts until an imaginary future president has the good sense to call off the program. As we can see, this move is counterproductive, it just leads the dingbats to double down on stupid.
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Of course I agree gender is more than a social construct. I imagine transgender people would also agree with that statement because their brains are wired in a different way to people who share their birth gender.
I know that I, for example, never considered my gender for a second. To think your body parts aren’t the right ones is something incredibly deep. In fact, talk to any man about sex reassignment surgery and I promise you the automatic reaction is we sort of cringe and put our hands over our crotches just in case someone nearby has scissors and a plan 😀
So we’re not really talking about men in dresses. We’re talking about people who are generally willing to lose an appendage.
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Well, there are fetishists who walk around in dresses without bothering or wanting to undergo self-mutilation. The degrees and varieties of what people feel are infinite.
What concerns a lot of people, including me even if I don’t like the tactics of “my side”, is that the U.S government is taking a hard stand on a philosophical position that gender and sex are pretty much unrelated phenomena. It is an untenable philosophical position, and yet they are defining dissenters from this official doctrine as being evil or stupid.
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But are they saying it’s unrelated, or saying we don’t get to make that decision for another free citizen?
That’s a very important distinction; not unlike this recent transformation of the definition of religious freedom. It used to mean anyone could practice any religion they chose, now they’re trying to make it mean that you get to impose your religion on paying customers.
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A man choosing to dress as a woman is an entirely private affair, and so statistically rare as to be not worth making it a matter of law one way or another. The reason why government and business are trying to make a non-issue into an issue is because of a very tenuous philosophical commitment.
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All this debate makes me terribly self-conscious; and I don’t like reading people whom I enjoy, and enjoy engaging with, on about “fetishists”, “men in dresses”, “mutilate themselves”, “trannies”, etc, etc.
I peed sitting down long before I had my adjustment. Now, loos often have moist wipes to cleanse the seat before using it. Sometimes, water can visibly splash out onto the seat during flushing- I was told spray could get as far as eight feet from the bowl. So damp towels within eight feet of the loo render washing your hands useless.
Sad to hear Kate is still obsessed. (If she pops by here, that was me showing disrespect.)
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If you want to criticize my tone, fair enough, I was in a pissy mood yesterday. But at least part of the motive for the dismissive language was the fact that these issues should not be political. Your personal experiences, however important to you and to the people who love you, are trivial on a political level. They are private by definition.
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I meant it in part as a compliment. I was not merely sugaring the pill.
Who started it, the Left or the Right? I started to express myself female more and more, then I went to the loos; I just did, and was fortunate to have no problem. School children transition, and the teachers get involved, then the school boards, then the Federal government, then the State governments; I want the children to have reasonable privacy, and not to be treated differently because of their (my) idiosyncrasy. I feel one trans girl who has had the difficulty of persuading her parents and family, and then her peers, is the vulnerable one in need of protection. If a trans girl does something objectionable, deal with it when it actually happens.
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I think there are several issues being conflated here:
1) Assuming your sex is ambiguous enough and you behaved yourself, your experience of using the ladies room is a private one, not worthy of public notice, outrage, celebration, or, especially, legislation.
2) A teenager is not competent to make those sorts of decisions, certainly not ones involving hormones or surgeries. A school principal should have the minimum discretion to handle such cases as they arise. Since they are vanishingly rare, this is worthy of being the basis of any sort of public policy.
3) The argument that transsexuals will put women at risk is probably disingenuous and not worth addressing.
4) The entire discussion presumes that crossdressing and “transitioning” is in fact the best course of action for a person like you. I would say that it is extremely doubtful that a man who is convinced that he is supposed to be a woman should be encouraged to think that way. Any therapy should be focused on helping him adequate his feelings to his physical reality, not the inverse. I know you disagree, but intelligent people do that sometimes.
Currently, per the United States Attorney General, the opinion I voiced above is indistinguishable from racism, and at best motivated by a quivering fear of change.
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From what I understand (and anyone is free to correct me)- the scientific consensus is it’s more effective (and productive) to change the body than it is to attempt to change the vision/psychology of a transexual individual.
We’re more than genitalia. Except for Trump; he’s a professional micro-penis. Possibly even an Asian one!
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Trump does seem to have some overcompensation issues.
I’m not aware of any scientific consensus, but psychology is not “a science”, at least not the way physics is. More of a discipline with a lot of philosophy, tribal lore, and woo thrown in.
You atheists are always inviting me to join the reality based community, then you claim that a man whose body is clearly one thing should be encouraged to think he possesses a disembodied soul that is something else?
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Well, psychology is the study of behaviour- and in sense an applied science. Hypotheses for treatments for various conditions are tested and results recorded. That’s how we KNOW conversion therapy doesn’t work on gay people.
The interesting angle to this discussion is the importance people put on gender. If someone changes their hair colour or has plastic surgery, it’s considered no big deal. Tattoos, piercings, blue hair, liposuction, breast augmentation, nose reductions, skin bleaching, tanning, coloured contact lenses- but then we get to gender and a line is drawn? How? Why?
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You can never have the same level of certainty in psychology as in a hard science. Whether on not things like mental and social sciences can even be called “science” is an interesting discussion but a bit off track.
I happen to think most plastic surgeries are wrong. Fixing a problem is one thing, fixing something that does not need to be fixed is an expression of vanity, stupidity, and a horrible waste of money.
Removing healthy organs is taking plastic surgery out of the realm of frivolity and into a whole new area of moral problems.
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How does it relate to morality? There’s a problem with the mathematics of that equation.
If x is “bad” because of reason y then anything containing reason y is also bad. So if we take your example of plastic surgery being “bad” because it’s fixing something that doesn’t really need to be fixed, then we have to put all cosmetic procedures/treatments in the same category. From dental whitening to eyebrow plucking.
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First, I want to underline that attempting to “change gender” is not cosmetic surgery. The difference between that and teeth whitening is one of kind, not degree.
That having been said, there is probably an issue of proportionality involved. Plucking eyebrows is probably “de minimis”, such a small act that it is morally indifferent.
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What’s different about changing gender to having cosmetic surgery? You’re taking something you were born with and transforming it into something different. Have you heard of a program called Extreme Makeover?
Why is it suddenly not acceptable in the case of gender? Who gets to make that decision? The Catholic church takes no official position on the matter. The Church of England even has transgender clergy. Muslim Iran has allowed sex change operations since Khomeini. So even if it were a matter of morality, whose morality do we go by?
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On Extreme Makeover do they remove healthy organs? That is what is happening here. You are trying to create a spectrum where there is none, as if a woman shaving her legs and a man shaving off his testicles are variations on a theme. I think there is an obvious difference of kind between a man plucking his eyebrows, a man getting pectoral muscle implants, and a man removing his penis. The first is indifferent, the second absurd, and the third pitiful.
As for whose morality, I am trying to talk common sense but what I call common sense is apparently outdated.
Perhaps the moral question can’t be answered without the metaphysical one: is the body a plaything which can be subjected to infinite manipulation by the human intellect that possesses it? That seems to be the contemporary take, but it seems to be a poor one to me.
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You’re assigning points to body changes based on a factor you’re *choosing* to put above others.
You cannot make the argument that one woman can have a breast augmentation without that argument also supporting that a woman can have a penile implant. The mathematics is the same.
The same is true of a nose reduction/breast reduction/fat reduction with a male to female sex change.
That’s not a contemporary take, it’s Aristotelian logic.
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Aristotle would not have judged actions of two different categories by the same logic.
A woman who gets a breast argumentation is committing one sort of act motivated by vanity, frivolity, and probably low self-esteem, a woman who gets a penile implant is committing another kind of act motivated by much more serious emotional problems. Perhaps they are analogous acts insofar as both involve operations, but really not in the same category. The first is a mistaken attempt to enhance what she already has. It is “cosmetic surgery” insofar as it relates back to aesthetics, however silly those aesthetics may be. The second is not really cosmetic, it is a rejection of what she is.
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Sorry, but that’s a complete departure from classical logic (and mathematics.)
In logic, statements p and q are logically equivalent if they have the same logical content. In this case it’s the addition or subtraction of body parts. An breast augmentation from a size A or after a mastectomy is the addition of a body part. And removals of parts are removals. They’re not different categories at all.
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Scenario: a surgeon is operating on an accident victim. One of the victim’s legs is badly mangled, will never heal, and so the surgeon must remove it to save the life of the victim. The victim’s other leg is fine, but the surgeon does ahead and removes that leg too because it is a nice leg and the surgeon thinks it will make a nice addition it for his private collection of random body parts.
According to your logic, both the surgeon’s actions are identical: he is simply removing a leg.
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Interesting comparison; although the issue with it is you’ve inserted a variable.
You’re mathematically correct in the equivalency while you’re talking about the removal of two legs- that’s a straightforward x=p (or more precisely x=x), but the second you insert the conditionals, you change the whole equation- so suddenly you have x=x(y). X can’t equal x(y) unless the y doesn’t change x. See the problem?
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Of course I inserted a variable, actually I intentionally inserted two variables. What, to your mind, are the variables in question in the case I proposed? What determines the nature of the first act as opposed to the second?
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@ DPMonahan This ‘I would say that it is extremely doubtful that a man who is convinced that he is supposed to be a woman should be encouraged to think that way. ‘
Have you actually met and had any serious discussions with a trans person who trusts you enough to tell you how they /feel/? If you had, I think you’d find that they tried to ‘fit in’, for years. And failed.
Did we not have this same discussion 40 years ago about people who were ‘not straight’? The lack of logic, not to mention historical perspective, not to mention empathy is mind boggling.
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Terribly unfortunate that neither Emily Post or Amy Vanderbilt are alive. People don’t realize it, but they’re what the world needs to function better. The oil on the machine.
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DP, it isn’t as simplistic as “men using the ladies room”, but that’s what people who want to pretend that gender is only how one is equipped to pee want to claim.
where is anyone claiming that gender is “only a social construct”? That seems to be the same simplistic claim as above?
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That is the underlying philosophical position the government is taking.
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Please show where and how.
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See the comment of Attorney General Lynch on the federal suit against North Carolina.
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please show where and how. You made the claim. Support it.
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I’m not doing your homework for you.
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“I’m not doing your homework for you.” The classic dodge of someone who has made a claim and now cannot support it. Thanks, DP. You’ve done your job in adding to the mountain of evidence that being a Christian doesn’t make anyone a better human being.
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It was a test. Based on past experience with you I know you are the type who will avoid serious thought by always asking for proof of an assertion and when it is offered complain it is not the exact kind of proof you are looking for and make hair-splitting distinctions about what constitutes just the sort of proof that you, with your exalted and refined mind, find acceptable. Hence, a discussion never gets off the ground but just ends up burrowing down epidemiological rabbit holes.
Were you interested in my opinion you would have read the statement after a two minute google search and started the discussion based on your reading.
Now run along and bother someone else.
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oh my, so now it was a “test”. You are certainly racking up the classic excuses used by those who cannot support their claims.
You have made the claim, DP, and rather than producing the evidence to support your claim, you wish to make false claims about me in order to make one more excuse on why you cannot produce this evidence to support your claim.
The only reason that this discussion is not “getting off the ground” is that you refuse to offer anything to discuss. You want to make a claim that and then not have anyone question it.
You have made the claim that there is a statement that supports your claim but refuse to produce it. Why is this, DP? And no, DP, I will not “run along and bother someone else”. Thanks for the patronizing attempt to avoid answering my question.
As always, you are welcome to support your claims. It is your choice not to.
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I find the amount of energy spent on problems like this that don’t exist to be quite mind-boggling. If as much energy were spent on problems that do exist, i.e,, keeping Republican senators and Catholic priests away from children, I’d feel much better about it.
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I hope someone starts taking those unicorns who are threatening my house seriously. I haven’t seen them yet, but I suspect they’re not far away. They never are, are they?
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You’ve got unicorn issues, eh? With me it’s giant, man-eating scorpions. Horrid beasts.
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Wasn’t her piece tongue in cheek?
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Unfortunately not. She and the Arborist are on an anti-trans-women crusade.
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Really? You sure? My humourometer must be malfunctioning.
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100% sure. She also believes trans women should not be allowed inside women’s bathrooms.
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Hi. Found your blog through your comments on whyevolutionistrue (I use the same name there).
I’ve been trying to make sense of this whole trans-women in bathrooms thing through your blog posts (a couple of people have mentioned the subject on WEIT as well, though those people seemed somewhat transphobic to me).
I still don’t get it. Why and how are they planning to prevent trans people from using certain bathrooms? And why do some feminists think it will lead to increase in rapes?
I haven’t seen any guards in front of public bathrooms so what is to prevent men from entering now? If a man wants to rape someone in a bathroom, there is no need for him to dress up as a woman. All he has to do is enter the bathroom and hope that there’s a woman in there that’s alone.
And how will they prevent trans people from entering? Are they going to check genitalia of everyone entering? Will they do an ultrasound to check for the presence of ovaries? What about intersex people? If this is only about trans-women that haven’t done surgery yet, then there is still the problem with separating “real men” from “real women”. I have seen some women that actually look a lot like men (some are also suffering from hirsutism). Will they be forced to go to the men’s bathroom?
For me, most people seem to be too concerned about gender in general. During my studies we all had to share tiny unisex changing rooms at every hospital we worked at. We didn’t see it as a problem. Allowed me to check out the bodies of well-traind guys. 🙂
I understand when it comes to showers, but they should have individual showers anyway, because of girls, not guys (girls can be extremely cruel in pointing out flaws in each other’s bodies).
I don’t really feel like visiting those crazy pseudo feminist sites to check out their side of the argument so I’m relying on places like your blog on this subject. 🙂
I feel somewhat sorry for the women that are so afraid of men that they want to check under people’s skirts to ensure they don’t have a penis. It reminds me of some muslim women that claims the burqa liberates them from the attention of men.
Sorry for the long comment, I’m just trying to make sense of this.
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Firstly, this is a fabricated issue. A lot of noise is being made, but it is mostly just noise.
Only a very small, I’d even say insignificant, percentage of feminists take the anti-trans-woman position. Those who do seem to be using it as an easy method to draw attention to themselves- as is the case of the person I mentioned in the post above. Talking about the dangers transwomen pose to segregated train carriages is tantamount to discussing the dangers of whale bone corsets to the 21st century woman.
Soon after I engaged in this debate I realized most of the anti-transwoman comments were coming from the same small group of people. They use multiple identities on twitter and wordpress. In fact, one of the self -described TERFs turned out to be none other than Christian Right activist Austin Ruse (who is neither a woman nor a feminist.)
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I was hoping it was only a fabricated issue. There’s a lot of noise being made, yes. Even my parents have heard of this, which goes to show that it’s been getting some media attention.
I also think that only a minority of feminists are taking the transphobic position. I am a feminist myself after all. I don’t really want to be associated with these people, just like I don’t want to be associated with the special snowflakes on the regressive left, even though I’m firmly placed on the left myself.
And, as you’ve shown, many of these people are actually right wing Christians, not feminists.
The amusing thing is that many of the anti-trans people on the right wing are strongly against SJW, but are actually becoming SJWs themselves by wanting safe spaces away from trans people.
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Really? One of the TERFS was Austin Ruse? I didn’t know that but it makes sense.
I rhink the best comment out of the fabulous press interview by Attorney General Loretta Lynch was the line about the North Carolina Law, when she siad it was government forcing an identity on people, a false identity, when we all are free to choose our own identies not have the government shove one down your throat.
And Obama in a 1-2 combination punch sending every single school district in the United States a letter co-signed by the Director of the Education Department and Attorney Generale Loretta Lynch telling the school districts that they can’t discriminate against students who are transgender was really the cherry on top of the Sundae.
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The voice of sweet reason! The only social construct at play here is, as you say, the ‘sanctity’ of the female only toilet. Talk about not seeing the obvious. THANK YOU!
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I’ve lived in New York my whole life…I’ve seen a man in full drag use the ladies’ room & nobody else in there bat an eye about it; I’ve seen women bring their 6 year old sons in the ladies’ room at Yankee Stadium & nobody says “you can’t do that”; I’ve seen a bathroom stall in one Manhattan bar that has its very own glory hole. I know people who snort cocaine off of toilet seats in public bathrooms, who use a public restroom like a motel room.
As for the New York City subway, people use it as a toilet (I wish they wouldn’t), a dining room, a sleeping quarters, a makeup chair, etc.
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Read it: So far, one for, one against, rest of the world silent. Sounds about the right balance.
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Not quite, Hariod…we’re all stunned by the imbecility of the whole thing. 😦
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Sure thing Meeks; we’ll settle on ‘stunned silence’ then; though I was rather pointing to a seemingly shrinking congregation at the church (*sings* “of the poisoned mind”?).
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Aaaaah! -grin- Sorry. I misplaced my funny bone this morning. Don’t worry though, just found it again. It was hiding under the couch.
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Delighted as I am to have such formidable intellects debating my position, I thought I might say a few words. I know what a syllogism is, but when logic variables become single letters I glaze over a bit. But removing a healthy leg without patient consent is an insane irrelevance.
It is not necessary to say gender is merely a social construct to support trans women- the theories of innate gender identity caused by hormone balance in the womb would need it to be natal rather than simply cultural.
I am not some cartesian intellect controlling a body like a piece of meat: I am an individual, with conscious, unconscious and autonomic mental processes and a physical body intimately connected with them. Like anyone, I have impulses and desires, and make choices, and the choices I have made include physical and social transition, because I thought I would be happier and better-functioning. Arguably I have been. While my bits appeared to work normally I don’t think I could have been a father, bringing a child up.
One only does this incredible, monstrous thing because the alternative- not doing it- is worse.
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I didn’t keep pushing on the logical/mathematical argument because I thought it might come off as reductionist. To me, of course, it isn’t.
In my view it is important to make the distinction between a voluntary procedure by a free adult (and many are done)- and the actions of a doctor who apparently steals body parts (for his personal collection?) I erred on the side of not continuing that particular conversation.
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I don’t think you were reductionist, because you were arguing, with me, for the health of the whole human, rather than just a body part. I imagined Mr Terry, in Brighton, with a collection of testicles in jars as a souvenir of his surgical practice.
It is a paradox.
I disguise and mutilate myself
to express and liberate myself.
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