Gender again. Sorry!

[Rusty Nails]

I find myself agreeing with @winjim about this argument. It is a debate about very complicated issues, which I accept I also do not know a great deal about, and there seems very little room for manouvrability between the two apparently polar opposite positions that the thread's main protagonists demand answers on.
I find that the questions being asked by these protagonists are framing binary questions and demanding binary answers to what are multi-faceted problems.
I will continue to read threads like this plus articles in the media to build up a broader knowledge than I have of the issues but I will not contribute unless I find questions that can be answered in a simple, meaningful way, without an essay, and which are not set to categorise the responder as either transphobic or anti-women.

 

[theclaud]

My issue Winjim is that you never specifically, in detail, say what you think. I think you said you would regard transwomen as women in some situations but not in others. But you don't want to expand on what that even means never mind which situations. What we get is a lot of 'it's complicated .... nuanced....', which takes us absolutely nowhere.

I think the difference might be that @winjim uses the discussion process to interrogate and develop his thoughts on the matter, rather than steamrollering through the thread with a set of granitic certainties and getting defensive at every minor challenge thereto.

 

[theclaud]

The one on the right or the one on the left? ...

It's a cheap gag, but in the context, I'll allow it. 🧑🏻‍⚖️

 

[AuroraSaab]

By fully transitioned, Bromptonaut, I assume you mean those who have had surgery. I can't find any UK figures but US figures suggest that only 5 to 10% of transwomen have surgery. So not very many would meet your criteria. My problem, obviously, is that they are still male and the risk and discomfort for women in single sex spaces and services remains the same.

As to calculating the risk. Well we're just back to stuff like women's dignity and privacy not really mattering, if it's only the risk of sexual assault that counts.

 

[theclaud]

The bolded bit summarises the difference between the views of GC feminists (I'll avoid the term TERF) and those of us on the other side of the aisle. So far as I am concerned a fully transitioned Transwoman is a woman.

The existence of Trans people, whether or not they have a GRC under either the current law or any proposed version of self ID, poses some practical issues for the rest of society. My view is that government should identify what the problems really are, what risk, if any they pose to other members of society and, based on a Probability*Consequence matrix order those risks and the proportionate mitigations required.

The so called Haldane case (Lady Haldane is the Judge; the normal protocol is to use the name of the parties) is a bit of an oddity. It seems that one part of the Scottish Government was pursuing a point about trans people on public bodies without those piloting the Gender Recognition Reform Bill being sighted on the issue as it affected their Bill's interaction with the Equalities Act.

At the moment it's a decision of the Outer House of the Court of Session. I suspect it will be appealed to the Inner House and perhaps onwards. Once it's finally decided mitigation may need an amendment to the Equalities Act. Or perhaps just guidance in the light of a more nuanced decision by a more senior court.

I'm not really taking issue with the direction of this post, but it's perfectly possible not to share any belief in people (trans or otherwise) having an innate gender of which there is a true expression, but to believe in bodily autonomy and the right of people to be, as it were, the authors of their own selves, and to have that socially and legally respected. I wrote upthread, in the context of the law reform project in the OP looking at the problems with current legal definitions of gender, that gender is socially produced, which obviously means that context is important, and that the performance of gender is never reducible to someone's own understanding of who they are. Catharine MacKinnon once wrote that heterosexuality was essentially the eroticization of dominance and submission. There's an obvious sense in which rape, for example, is the performance of masculinity par excellence, and in the UK at present we have a gendered law defining it which acknowledges this. Similarly, 'fully transitioned' has no legal meaning in terms of either discrimination/harassment/victimisation protections or access to a GRC under either current procedures or proposed reforms. We need to tease out the contexts in which a person's gender history might be relevant to who is doing what to whom - I don't think the mantra 'Trans women are women' is helpful to any of this.

 

[multitool]

Probably not relevant but, last night, I tried out a little experiment on my unsuspecting wife whilst she was downstairs, relaxing in the living room.

I crept into the room and yelled "TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN!!!", then immediately stood back, expecting her to dissolve at molecular level, disappearing before my eyes in a vapour of erasure.

But she didn't. Instead, and without breaking glance from 'Call The Midwife', she merely asked me if I'd put the bins out yet.

 

[winjim]

I think the difference might be that @winjim uses the discussion process to interrogate and develop his thoughts on the matter, rather than steamrollering through the thread with a set of granitic certainties and getting defensive at every minor challenge thereto.

I think in this thread the OP was asking us to look at sex and gender in a different sort of way, how we define it, why we register it and so forth. As you know, I'm fully up for smashing the patriarchy just as soon as I have a free weekend, but here I'm trying to get outside that, pull back to first principles in a way, look at specific aspects of sex, gender and society and not get dragged into what I see as more general, and to be fair well entrenched and rather tedious arguments.

What's the first thing we ask when someone has a baby? Sex and weight. And you know, those are the least interesting things about babies but they are quantitative things that can be objectively recorded and understood by people so that's what we tell everyone. The most interesting things about babies are intangible, esoteric and can only be understood by parents in a way, and not even other parents, just the parents of that particular baby. And they can't be properly conveyed in language, maybe poets and artists can come close but they're feelings and somehow they're not even real. So we get lumped with a sex, and by association a gender, it gets written down and becomes a core part of who we are from the moment we're born, or even with modern scans, from before that point. We're a gender before we're even a person.

Incidentally my 3yo hasn't got the hang of gender at all. I'm not even sure he sees men and women as different. He certainly still uses the same pronouns for everything and everyone and while there's an aspect of default male creeping in (Mummy is still 'him') it is interesting to watch. I wonder when he'll start using 'she'. Also he's got long blond hair so is constantly misgendered by kindly old ladies but I don't think he even notices. That's all by the by anyway.

 

[theclaud]

Probably not relevant but, last night, I tried out a little experiment on my unsuspecting wife whilst she was downstairs, relaxing in the living room.

I crept into the room and yelled "TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN!!!", then immediately stood back, expecting her to dissolve at molecular level, disappearing before my eyes in a vapour of erasure.

But she didn't. Instead, and without breaking glance from 'Call The Midwife', she merely asked me if I'd put the bins out yet.

More importantly, had you cleaned the bathroom?

 

[theclaud]

@winjim I think I forgot to say, but thanks for posting the @languagejones video upthread. It is right up my Straße.

 

[icowden]

More importantly, had you cleaned the bathroom?

Hmmm. Our household I do the bins, the laundry, the washing up. Wife does oven cleaning. Gardening is 50/50 (I mow the lawn and trim things she faffs with plants) and food shopping probably 50/50 although she tends to do big shops while I do daily shops.

 

[winjim]

@winjim I think I forgot to say, but thanks for posting the @languagejones video upthread. It is right up my Straße.

Cool, I thought you'd enjoy it. I was hoping to cut through the Argy Bargy of the thread as I felt it was more in keeping with the spirit of the OP but it is what it is. He certainly made some interesting points and got me thinking in places.

 

[winjim]

Putting the bins out is like a two minute job on a Sunday night. I'm not sure it really counts.

 

[Ian H]

More importantly, had you cleaned the bathroom?

View attachment 2919

Oh dear. We're doing it wrong.

 

[winjim]

Equality of opportunity has been enshrined in law for decades, even if it has not always been achieved in practice. We have also got to the point where women can be appointed to posts simply because they are women. Positive discrimination is still discrimination. It can also be insulting to women as it implies they cannot get there by merit alone.

Separate sporting categories are an example of positive discrimination, generally in favour of women, which are also designed to provide equality of opportunity.

 

[Unkraut]

It's a cheap gag, but in the context, I'll allow it. 🧑🏻‍⚖️