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Epiphanies 2023: Scottish Gender Recognition Act and UK Block

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  • But I think that points towards a significant part of where my difficulty with this subject comes from. I don't really think that any activities, fashions, hairstyles, or so forth are inherently masculine or feminine, which to my mind makes them poor reasons to change gender. I mean, I grew up in the 80s watching Boy George on Top of The Pops and loving how his appearance tore apart conservative notions of how boys should dress and act**. It feels like in the Twenty20s a similar person would just come out as female, which to me feels like an affirmation of those conservative notions - it says that if you want to act this way then you have to be a boy and if you want to act that way then you have to be a girl. It feels like the same old restrictive boxes are back, but with a bit of a bridge between them so you can decide which one to be restricted by.

    I think I'm probably repeating some of what others are saying when I say I think you may be reversing the causality. Generally speaking, I don't think natal males transition to female because they want to wear skirts. Rather, wearing skirts (/long hair/traditionally female names) is associated (in our culture, at least) with being female and is one way that people who identify as female express that identity. Without knowing any of the people involved I would guess that something along these lines is going on with the person Trudy is talking about.

  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    Marsupial wrote: »
    Without knowing any of the people involved I would guess that something along these lines is going on with the person Trudy is talking about.

    Yes, that's my impression too -- it's the observer who reverses the causality and thinks, "But why can't you just [do x thing that's typically associated with the other gender] but remain [gender assigned at birth]?" But for the trans or nonbinary person themself, that "x thing" is just an outward expression of their inner sense of gender.

    What makes it confusing for some of us cis folks who maybe haven't had to give it a lot of thought (like me) is wondering: if a person's sense of gender isn't determined by their biology OR by their outward appearance/behavior/social gender expression norms, what IS it determined by? How do you "know" you're a man, or a woman, or non-binary?

    A lot of the difficulty seems (to me) to stem from our attempts to understand other people's answers to that question. (Which, maybe we don't need to! but it feels natural to wonder).
  • Women's rugby comes up as an alternate case in gender roles and athletic competition, also roller derby. Both are sports that are, at least in some circles, associated with women that also have a tough confrontational image. Though these are cultural niches in a way that (at least in the US) futbol americano isn't.
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Trudy wrote: »
    How do you "know" you're a man, or a woman, or non-binary?

    I think I go with 'You just do' - with the qualification that people may have different models of femaleness/maleness.

    I experience myself as ineluctably female, but not feminine, as as maternal as a cuckoo. But I find a model in various ancient or chthonic goddesses - that kind of female.

    From time to time there are attempts to reinstate a mythopoeic model - remember Iron John?
  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    Though, if asked how I know I'm a man the answer "I just do" will be accepted without any real questioning. But, the same answer from someone who isn't cisgendered is followed up with a tsunami of questions - because the answer that's acceptable for someone who is cisgendered isn't considered good enough by far too many people.
  • Yes, I was using the egg analogy referring to gender expression, which is not necessarily the same as gender identity. Eg, a drag queen can have a female gender expression including she/her pronouns while also being male. I also read the case in Trudy's example as being the reverse of what @Marvin the Martian said, ie that the long hair and dresses are an outward expression of the person's inward gender. Nobody thinks putting on a dress makes them trans, it's just something transphobes make up. A cis drag queen isn't trans and everyone knows that.

    Also trans people who don't follow gender norms exist just as much as cis people doing the same exist, but as I said this can impede access to healthcare and personal safety.
  • Also @Marsupial I'm curious as to what other issues you think have potential to be distorted by an emphasis on choice and autonomy. For me the analogy to career is an interesting one because what you choose as a career - especially something like being a doctor where others are reliant on you for life and death situations - affects others much more than any decision made around gender identity. Someone else's gender identity is simply none of my business, whereas someone who is very unsuitable for medicine as a career becoming a doctor has a much bigger impact on me as someone with frequent interactions with doctors!

    The only people who need to know my gender are medical professionals where relevant - and it isn't actually always relevant - and occasionally others on a need-to-know basis. It doesn't affect anyone else. My gender isn't a problem, it's a cissexist society making it a problem.

    Also, the term 'natal males' is associated with transphobic ideas about how trans women are 'really men' - I'm sure it wasn't meant that way, but you can just refer to trans women transitioning without needing to refer to any pre-transition gender. Aside from anything else, intersex people can and do transition so not all trans women are actually 'natal males' to start with. Although the way TERFs turned on a cis intersex lesbian like Caster Semenya (Caster was assigned female at birth and identifies as female and therefore is cis as well as intersex) and accused her of being trans means it's unlikely that transphobes would care about this anyway.
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    edited February 2023
    @Pomona, almost that exact same point about gender vs career was made by the young trans person I was referring to -- as they are in the middle of a university degree in a subject they basically don't like and aren't interested in, and I have often tried to suggest that they consider other options. When I asked "why are you willing to take a step towards personal fulfillment as big and significant as transitioning, but not willing to think about changing your career path?" their answer was very much what you have said above. A change regarding gender was a private matter that didn't really impact anyone else and that they didn't actually see as a big deal, except if other people chose to make it a big deal by being transphobic. Whereas changing their major when already 80% of the way through a degree is a much bigger change with a lot more upheaval involved.

    That perspective definitely surprised me. My impression of coming out as trans was much more like what Martin said above -- a transition that:
    has all sorts of costs attached and means complete upheaval of your entire life

    The fact that a young person would see transitioning as less of a big deal than a career change really forced me to question a lot of my assumptions (never a bad thing). But I did see how what I perceived as the "costs attached" are mostly costs imposed by other people's transphobia.
  • Trudy wrote: »
    The fact that a young person would see transitioning as less of a big deal than a career change really forced me to question a lot of my assumptions (never a bad thing).

    Besides; it's likely - at some point - that someone will be far more settled on the question of which gender they are than which career they should pursue.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Gwai wrote: »
    *Here American football is seen as activity very very few women engage in, but soccer much less so.

    Indeed, many young girls here play soccer, at least until about age 12, in mixed teams.
  • Trudy wrote: »
    What makes it confusing for some of us cis folks who maybe haven't had to give it a lot of thought (like me) is wondering: if a person's sense of gender isn't determined by their biology OR by their outward appearance/behavior/social gender expression norms, what IS it determined by? How do you "know" you're a man, or a woman, or non-binary?

    Quite so. In fact, I’d go further and say that it raises questions about how we should define the very concepts of “male” and “female”, “man” and “woman” if we can’t use biology or appearance or social role or, seemingly, anything.
  • I certainly think that in terms of churches dealing with issues of marriage equality, getting to grips with gender as a whole as part of such discussions would probably have been extremely helpful (and for that reason is of course unlikely to happen).
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    Quite so. In fact, I’d go further and say that it raises questions about how we should define the very concepts of “male” and “female”, “man” and “woman” if we can’t use biology or appearance or social role or, seemingly, anything.

    Which brings us right back around to the question of self-ID: do we trust people when they say what their gender is, even if it isn't immediately apparent to the rest of us?

    My inclination is to say that yes, of course we should, even if we can't quite explain HOW somebody identifies their gender. I think I am in a place of "occasionally confused, but accepting that other people know best how to describe their own lived experience."

  • Trudy wrote: »
    Quite so. In fact, I’d go further and say that it raises questions about how we should define the very concepts of “male” and “female”, “man” and “woman” if we can’t use biology or appearance or social role or, seemingly, anything.

    Which brings us right back around to the question of self-ID: do we trust people when they say what their gender is, even if it isn't immediately apparent to the rest of us?

    My inclination is to say that yes, of course we should, even if we can't quite explain HOW somebody identifies their gender. I think I am in a place of "occasionally confused, but accepting that other people know best how to describe their own lived experience."

    I think we have to. The alternative is to dictate to somebody what their identity is, which is bizarre. But some of the transphobes are doing exactly that.
  • Trudy wrote: »
    Which brings us right back around to the question of self-ID: do we trust people when they say what their gender is, even if it isn't immediately apparent to the rest of us?

    My inclination is to say that yes, of course we should, even if we can't quite explain HOW somebody identifies their gender. I think I am in a place of "occasionally confused, but accepting that other people know best how to describe their own lived experience."

    So I think we have to take as fact that each individual is the best judge of how they feel, and how they experience the world. The point where that might be open for debate is their identification of those feelings and experiences as a particular gender.

    @Gwai mentioned the idea of a person trying on various labels, and feeling more comfortable with one particular label. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable tool to use to explore your own self-image. And if somebody wants to be referred to as a particular gender, why wouldn't I just follow their wishes? I don't need to police their choices, or agree with them.

    But at some level, we're chasing around in a bunch of circular definitions here. Person X says that they feel like a man, so they are a man. What is a man? A man is anyone who says that they are a man. Which is meaningless - at some point, you have to pin your definitions to something else.

    I could conceptually imagine measuring gender on some sort of spectrum - perhaps with some sort of personality trait questionnaire - and could imagine that the bulk of the answers might land in two clusters. And that one of the clusters might be mostly populated by people with penises, and the other mostly by people with vaginas, and then we could choose to label those clusters "men" and "women". This would be a way of creating a definition of "man" and "woman". But I don't know whether anyone has done this, or whether the data does cluster like that. But there are several posters here who know a lot about gender, so I'll ask them: does this make sense? Has this been done?

    Alan wrote upthread
    Though, if asked how I know I'm a man the answer "I just do" will be accepted without any real questioning.

    For me, personally, "I just do" isn't an answer at all. I know I'm a man because I put my underwear on every morning. That defines "man" for me - I don't have a sense of gender that is different than that. Perhaps this is because my sense of gender is so completely aligned with my bits that I don't notice, or perhaps it's that I don't actually have a sense of gender: I'm not sure how I'd tell the difference. As I mentioned upthread, my assumption has always been that if my brain was somehow transplanted into a female body, I would think of myself as being a woman. But of course, this is untestable.

  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    But at some level, we're chasing around in a bunch of circular definitions here. Person X says that they feel like a man, so they are a man. What is a man? A man is anyone who says that they are a man. Which is meaningless - at some point, you have to pin your definitions to something else.
    Why do you have to pin your definitions to something else? Why is it deemed necessary to have some form of objective criteria?
  • But at some level, we're chasing around in a bunch of circular definitions here. Person X says that they feel like a man, so they are a man. What is a man? A man is anyone who says that they are a man. Which is meaningless - at some point, you have to pin your definitions to something else.
    Why do you have to pin your definitions to something else? Why is it deemed necessary to have some form of objective criteria?

    Because otherwise we're having a caucus race. Language is only useful if we agree on what it means.
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host
    I guess if you want to impose restrictions, give protection, or give privilege to one gender or another you may need some way of identifying them which isn’t based in a person’s own assessment.
  • But at some level, we're chasing around in a bunch of circular definitions here. Person X says that they feel like a man, so they are a man. What is a man? A man is anyone who says that they are a man. Which is meaningless - at some point, you have to pin your definitions to something else.
    Why do you have to pin your definitions to something else? Why is it deemed necessary to have some form of objective criteria?

    Because otherwise you're just in Humpty Dumpty Land, where words mean whatever you want them to mean.

    And besides, if you abandon all objective definitions then there's no need to change from man to woman or woman to man in the first place - you can just decide that the meanings of those two words have changed such that what you previously meant by "woman" you now mean by "man", and vice versa.
  • BroJames wrote: »
    I guess if you want to impose restrictions, give protection, or give privilege to one gender or another you may need some way of identifying them which isn’t based in a person’s own assessment.

    Well, traditionally, it's based on anatomy and appearance. But appearance is created by the person, so it can be deceptive.
  • BroJames wrote: »
    I guess if you want to impose restrictions, give protection, or give privilege to one gender or another you may need some way of identifying them which isn’t based in a person’s own assessment.

    That may or may not be true, but the question is at a rather deeper level than that.

    What does the statement "John is a man" actually mean? It says that John says that he is a man. Well, OK - but that doesn't actually help us to know what "man" is. If you don't know what a "man" is, then knowing that John views himself as one doesn't actually tell you anything.

    In practice, I'll assert that the definition is actually pinned to the gender binary and cis-dominance. "Man" describes most people born with penises, and a trans man is making the statement "I am like most people born with penises, and not like most people born with vaginas".
  • Sorry, deceptive is a stupid word. It's wrong.
  • BullfrogBullfrog Shipmate
    edited February 2023
    One is reminded of the way God's name is often understood as "I am what I am." If we are imago dei, the same might apply.

    I think biological sex is mostly bound up in procreation, for most people, and even there we have workarounds for folks who want to work around the mechanical difficulties. Beyond that...does it really matter? Seems to me that a lot of hard gender ideas are bound up in treating people as tools, either athletes, soldiers, etc. They're relevant only insofar as they involve a person's ability to do particular things.

    And there are, I think, few places where one's reproductive organs are strictly relevant to one's work.
  • DafydDafyd Hell Host
    Which is meaningless - at some point, you have to pin your definitions to something else.
    Why do you have to pin your definitions to something else? Why is it deemed necessary to have some form of objective criteria?
    I think Wittgenstein's private language argument applies. Something that has no public meaning cannot have private meaning either.
  • I think it may be helpful to reflect upon the fact that most trans people do not seek a GRC, partly because GRCs are only necessary to change a few legal documents and also to negate the need to present the original document plus deed poll for eg (though even there, you can get a passport in the correct name and gender with just a letter from a GP). Also of course, non-binary people are not currently legally recognised in the UK (I believe the Scottish government would like to do so) so many trans people don't have a suitable gender to be legally recognised as in the first place, and marriage vows in England and Wales must be gendered by law which is another reason why many wouldn't bother if the gender used would be wrong anyway (Scottish marriage laws don't have this restriction). Access to GRCs as an administrative process rather than a medical one is important, but it isn't actually the most important thing for many trans people - not least because the changes proposed only change the process and not the substance of having a GRC.

    With regards to how someone's gender is decided, currently the application for a GRC is sent to an anonymous panel of doctors who do not know the applicant and will never meet them, and if the application is denied the applicant has no right to appeal. As in, if the panel decide that the applicant is wrong about their own gender the applicant has no way to refute that. I don't think many people are aware of just how much power total strangers (who given the numbers are likely cis) currently have over trans people's right to be legally identified as the correct gender. While not important to every trans person, this affects being able to have the right marriage and death certificates as well as birth certificates so will disproportionately affect trans people for whom religious marriage and death rituals are important. Regardless of the difficulties of deciding how to properly record gender decisions, I'm sure most people would agree that the current setup is dehumanising and unfair.
  • Bullfrog wrote: »
    I think biological sex is mostly bound up in procreation, for most people,

    Sure. And there's an obvious social use in knowing whether you're a person who can become pregnant, or a person who can impregnate someone else.
    Bullfrog wrote: »
    Beyond that...does it really matter? Seems to me that a lot of hard gender ideas are bound up in treating people as tools, either athletes, soldiers, etc. They're relevant only insofar as they involve a person's ability to do particular things.

    If you're talking about the person in the next office at work, then it's hard to see how it matters at all.

    It matters for things like sports only in the sense that we have decided, as a society, to have separate competitions for women, who tend to be slower, smaller, and physically weaker than men. So if you want to have a competition to see who is the best woman at running, or swimming, or whatever, then you have to have agreement on who the women are. And I can understand, in this context, a young woman who has been developing her sporting abilities, competing in competitions as she grew up, and knew where she stood in terms of ability vs her peers being a little taken aback when she's suddenly left standing by someone who has transferred across from the men's competition.

    And it matters for things like modesty (as regards changing rooms etc.) only in as far as we have been socialized to take a particular view of modesty.

    I'm comfortable changing in a room full of naked penises. This is what I have been conditioned to see as normal - cis men of all shapes and ages changing in a changing room. I'd be very much taken aback to encounter a vulva in the same circumstances, and would probably be very embarrassed. This has nothing really to do with the gender of the vulva-owner or the penis-owner, because I'm not asking that. This is just some random stranger getting changed: we're not having a conversation, and there's no real reason for me to know their gender.

    This is purely social conditioning. It would be possible to be conditioned to be relaxed about seeing naked bodies of all genital configurations, in which case I presumably wouldn't care who was changing where.

    (Also associated with changing rooms, toilets, sharing dormitories or tents, and so on is the "but there might be sex" scare. Sometimes the scare is about rape (generally of a person without a penis by a person with a penis), and more often the scare is just about putting a penis and a vagina in the same room and ending up with a baby. This is the typical concern about parents of cis girls who are concerned about a trans girl sharing their daughter's accommodation. It's all about the penis.)
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    Pomona wrote: »
    With regards to how someone's gender is decided, currently the application for a GRC is sent to an anonymous panel of doctors who do not know the applicant and will never meet them, and if the application is denied the applicant has no right to appeal. As in, if the panel decide that the applicant is wrong about their own gender the applicant has no way to refute that. I don't think many people are aware of just how much power total strangers (who given the numbers are likely cis) currently have over trans people's right to be legally identified as the correct gender....Regardless of the difficulties of deciding how to properly record gender decisions, I'm sure most people would agree that the current setup is dehumanising and unfair.

    It certainly is, and I think this is one of the strongest arguments in favour of allowing trans and non-binary people to self-identify -- any other method you could devise for "defining" people's gender would be much, much worse.
  • GwaiGwai Epiphanies Host
    Sure. And there's an obvious social use in knowing whether you're a person who can become pregnant, or a person who can impregnate someone else.
    Why? Why would you want to know whether the person you are chatting up a party could impregnate or be impregnated? If one is asking 'Do we need to use protection?' the question is relevant. But even for a very sexually active person, that can be relevant to only a small percentage of the people one may socialize with.

    Re the rest of your concerns, why does your comfort (or mine?) matter over the comfort of another person ? If someone wears an ugly dress, I don't tell them that just to get it out of my system. There was a loudly crying child on the street yesterday. It made me uncomfortable. But her mom was there, and she was clearly being cared for, so my discomfort was irrelevant. I think often we privilege comfort over caring for people properly. I have known grieving people who were told it was time to stop grieving and get over their spouse of many years because it made other people uncomfortable. In other words, if Natasha's gender makes me uncomfortable, why should that be Natasha's problem or anyone's problem besides my own?
  • Also, people made the same arguments about gay/bi men in men's changing rooms (and I remember such arguments being made in the media when discussing the lack of openly gay male footballers well into the 00s) and gay/bi women in women's changing rooms. Clearly it wasn't actually all about the penis then. Also, a lack of trans women and girls on eg residential school trips has not in any way actually prevented pregnancy or assault etc happening in those scenarios. Trans girls are not a risk to their classmates anymore than any other classmate is, yet somehow accusing children of being rapists in waiting is cloaked in 'reasonable concerns' language. I think some people are forgetting that trans girls are children first and foremost.

    Re sports, Lia Thomas won once. I think perpetuating the myth that trans women and girls are generally outperforming cis women and girls at sports is unhelpful here - especially as women's sports teams were started purely because men wouldn't let women join their teams due to sexist ideas about sport being unfeminine, not because cis women are inherently weak and helpless.

    In many places multi-gender nudity is completely normal, mostly in places with a tradition of saunas or hot springs. In Japan, tattoos are more taboo in the onsen (hot tub type bathing area in a Japanese spa) than seeing body parts that you don't have (tattoos in Japan are closely associated with organised crime).
  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    edited February 2023
    I'm comfortable changing in a room full of naked penises. This is what I have been conditioned to see as normal - cis men of all shapes and ages changing in a changing room. I'd be very much taken aback to encounter a vulva in the same circumstances, and would probably be very embarrassed.
    Whereas I hated sport at school, and part of that was because I was forced to change and shower in a room full of other boys. I was (and am) extremely uncomfortable with being naked and seeing people naked, and would have been very much happier at sports if there was some privacy in changing rooms such that I could get changed and showered without seeing other people nudity and being seen. There's no particular reason I can see why changing rooms, public toilets etc couldn't be designed so that everyone has privacy and doesn't have to face the embarrassment and discomfort of the nudity of strangers, at which point the gender or sexuality* of others in nearby spaces becomes totally irrelevant.

    * because the same arguments are made about gay men in mens toilets.
  • LouiseLouise Epiphanies Host
    It's worth bearing in mind that a lot of the common talking points used as part of the moral panic on this issue are, as Pomona said, found in previous moral panics eg. intersex folk in sport being treated as cheats and threats, lesbians seen as dangers in changing rooms, gay men as predators etc.

    Indeed there were a lot of racist moral panics that took similar forms with anxieties about sports performance, shared bathrooms, predator narratives, the need for definitions etc. (which led to sinister and absurd places as supremacist law codes tried to define and nail down eg. who was 'white')

    As I pointed out above, sex is a spectrum and thus doesn't have a nice neat binary definition rooted in biological reality. It seems like common sense to us that it should, but as soon as we try to define it, and worse try to police it with the state, we as humans, end up going to bad places.

    One bad place we have gone to, even thought it was meant to be an improvement, is the current medicalised GRC system Pomona describes. The history of how the British medical establishment pathologised and abused trans people under the guise of help, and became all-powerful gate-keepers is horrific. You can read some of the history here from Zoe Playdon.

    https://www.transactual.org.uk/blog/gender-identity-clinics-genesis

    I managed to go nearly fifty years of my life without having to think about the definition of woman - and I didn't have to convince some doctor I'd never met before who might have dodgy ideas about women that I was one. I was surprised to realise that the biology of humans with regard to sex was a lot more complicated than I'd ever thought before but that's fine. It's good to learn, The wonders of nature and all that...

    To me I'd think of woman very much like the civic nationalism definition of a Scot - 'anyone living here who wants to be one'. You get a much nicer country that way rather than going with all the 'blood and soil' stuff. The upsides of Self-ID are huge - it stops the cruelty and abuses of gender policing, allows trans and non-binary people to flourish, it's no skin off my nose and on the female side of it, I welcome my new allies - I've learned a lot about feminism from following trans women activists on social media - they've really had to think about gender in a way that I haven't. I keep finding that the prominent people who attack trans people on behalf of 'women' then go on to fraternise with and enable the very worst sort of woman haters, abusers and endangerers, and I draw my own conclusions from that.
  • Louise wrote: »
    To me I'd think of woman very much like the civic nationalism definition of a Scot - 'anyone living here who wants to be one'.

    But in that case “living here” is still very much an objectively independent geographical definition - you’re not just saying that a Scot is anyone who claims to be a Scot regardless of where in the world they live or have ever lived. Nor are you saying that there is no valid definition of “Scotland” other than what each individual claimant to that nationality may happen to mean by the word - I doubt you’d accept it were I to declare that I consider my house to be part of Scotland and therefore I should be considered factually, legally and morally just as Scottish as someone who has lived their whole life in Glasgow or Dundee.
  • LouiseLouise Epiphanies Host
    Yes, the 'here' is fuzzier because the underlying reality doesn't have neat geographical borders, wanting to live here is the more important bit.
  • This sounds like the old struggle with essentialism, that you can define things with a few essential categories, thus, "man" = + penis. One antidote to this is Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances, i.e., that instead there are overlapping categories. For example, you can say that men have penises, but there are men without. The same with other "essential" characteristics. So there is a group of traits, from which different "selections" are made, so you have fuzzy identity. I should add that this is not a new idea, and has been discussed by some philosophers and others, for example Judith Butler.
  • Bullfrog wrote: »
    I think biological sex is mostly bound up in procreation, for most people,

    Sure. And there's an obvious social use in knowing whether you're a person who can become pregnant, or a person who can impregnate someone else.
    Bullfrog wrote: »
    Beyond that...does it really matter? Seems to me that a lot of hard gender ideas are bound up in treating people as tools, either athletes, soldiers, etc. They're relevant only insofar as they involve a person's ability to do particular things.

    [...]

    This is purely social conditioning. It would be possible to be conditioned to be relaxed about seeing naked bodies of all genital configurations, in which case I presumably wouldn't care who was changing where.

    To the first, I don't think that's obvious at all. Outside of sexual affairs (which I don't consider social activity, at least by my social conditioning,) I really don't think impregnating is anything I need to be aware of.

    Also, knowing some trans folks, it's not generally the first date that you get into that particular conversation. It's intimate knowledge, socially it's none of my business.

    Far as dressing rooms, when I was in undergrad, we lived in a co-op that had once been a single-sex dorm and had a big open shower room. For convenience, it had a rotating "M" sign (M for men only, W for women only, E for everyone or 3 for me myself and I.) And for most people, "E" was the norm because it was inconvenient to wait in line.

    In my experience, one got used to it pretty quickly and learned to mind one's manners in mixed company. And I do think some of our housemates were trans and I don't remember it being a very heavy conversation. I wouldn't think we should expect all bathrooms or changing spaces to be everyone, but I think for trans folks who are common enough people should be given choice where they go and, barring anti-social behavior, that should be respected.

    And really, in most social settings, it does not matter whether one is male or female.
  • LouiseLouise Epiphanies Host
    While I'm at it, this is Jane Hamlin's account of applying for a Gender Recognition Certificate under the current system - it mentions the bureaucratic side of it

    https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/02/07/trans-gender-recognition-certificate-grc-experience/
    The Scottish parliament wanted reform to make life easier for people like Jane, who produced a “huge pile of documentation” for her GRC including a “passport, driving licence, old birth certificate, marriage certificate, plus utility bills” to prove that she had been living as a woman.

    Even so, this wasn’t enough.

    “I sent them off… stuff showing I’d been Jane for I don’t know how many years, and they wrote back and said: ‘Well, you haven’t sent much for the last two years,” she explains.

    “Because all you need to show is that you’ve been identifying as that person for two years.”

    She found it difficult to provide some paperwork because she had a gender-neutral title, initials on some documents and some bills in her wife’s name. She says it’s no wonder people get tripped up during the process

    It concludes:
    Jane is “baffled” by the Tories’ rhetoric, reiterating that gender recognition has nothing to do with the Equality Act.

    “It’s about getting a new birth certificate and marriage certificate correctly gender marked and, eventually when you die, you assume that people will honour it,” Hamlin says. “I don’t understand why it’s causing such a fuss other than they hate trans people, Scots or both.”
  • Yes, it affects absolutely nothing to do with the Equality Act - which is why it was supposed to be such a basic reform that Theresa May's government were happy to roll out (and it is depressing that the May government were less transphobic than the Labour opposition then, and much less transphobic than the Labour opposition now). It literally is just an administrative change.

    The toilets issue is baffling since in the UK gendered toilets have never been legally enforced, and everyone has the legal right to use the toilet that best suits them. Trans women have been using women's toilets for decades with no issue, and indeed using women's toilets is often required by gender clinicans as evidence of living as a woman.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    edited February 2023
    Yes. I find myself with Winston Smith in this - "I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY." I mean, understand the "WHY" is Transphobia, but I do not understand what the motivation is for that, when it's not from the Usual Suspects*

    *I expect the far right to be prejudiced. I don't expect the left to be. It goes against core left wing values.
  • DoublethinkDoublethink Admin, 8th Day Host
    Well this is particularly stupid: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64586523. At the bare minimum - could they not make a distinction between sex offenders, who are plausibly a sexual risk, and people in jail for other reasons.
  • Well this is particularly stupid: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64586523. At the bare minimum - could they not make a distinction between sex offenders, who are plausibly a sexual risk, and people in jail for other reasons.

    It's only for the initial assessment. As that likely takes place in segregation the difference is largely cosmetic. It's the quality of the subsequent risk assessment that is key. It's not ideal, but if it blunts the receptiveness of the less informed to the cries of the shit-flinging howler monkeys it might be a concession worth accepting.
  • LouiseLouise Epiphanies Host
    edited February 2023
    It's a fudge and I dont think it's a good one.

    I'm not as optimistic as Arethosemyfeet because when the Scottish government has tried to appease the more-zealous anti-trans campaigners in the past, it was a disaster. The anti-trans people instead of being pleased they got listened to and got their unusual extra consultation that they wanted, then used the delay to whip up more hatred and misinformation in the media, and still kept claiming there wasn't enough consultation and the government was rushing ahead when it was actually dragging its feet and proceeding at snail's pace.

    They were thus able to stoke the moral panic higher, and to make a piece of socially progressive legislation mild enough even for Theresa May claim a higher and higher political price.

    The trouble is this feeds the perception that there must have been a risk in the first place and that what was happening must have been unsafe for them to panic like this and to have an emergency consultation and change the rules. In fact, what they did in the first place was safe and they needed to stick to it, pointing out that people were in solitary and not a risk to others.

    Also relevant is that the worst homophobic/transphobic Scottish tabloid has seized on the accused in a new live case and before it went live with the person being charged, came out with a massively transphobic front page. I'm not going to take their word about anything or anyone's identity and Scottish contempt laws are very strict - much stricter than England so I'm being deliberately vague. So the government have probably done this to try and damp down that new attack as well, but my gloomy prediction is that it won't work because concessions of any sort are seized on in bad faith.
  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    Well this is particularly stupid: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64586523. At the bare minimum - could they not make a distinction between sex offenders, who are plausibly a sexual risk, and people in jail for other reasons.

    It's only for the initial assessment. As that likely takes place in segregation the difference is largely cosmetic. It's the quality of the subsequent risk assessment that is key. It's not ideal, but if it blunts the receptiveness of the less informed to the cries of the shit-flinging howler monkeys it might be a concession worth accepting.
    The very fact that there's been this panicked review and reached a blanket conclusion with much fanfare creates an impression that there are a lot of trans people in remand or recently convicted, rather than this being rare with plenty of time to do a decent assessment of where they should be best placed on a case by case basis. And, it also creates an impression that all trans people in prison are a risk to other prisoners (and, therefore by extension that those who have not committed a crime are a risk to people generally).

    Of course, that's old news for most minority groups. News media campaigns and knee-jerk poorly thought through political reactions have long painted people of colour, homosexuals, GRT communities and others as criminals that people need to be protected from. And, it's happening already. I know of one trans activist who has been prominent in media coverage of gender reform over the last few months (she's been at the front of many protests, and frequently gets interviewed by TV news) who has already been targeted by the Scottish Conservative Party Twitter feed in terms that paint her campaigning for her own rights as dangerous to others (and, apparently Twitter don't consider inciting violence against political activists who aren't straight cis gendered and white as against their terms).
  • I agree that trans people are not a physical danger to me, at least not any more than anyone else is. But I still struggle with the strong feeling that trans ideology is a metaphysical danger to my own sense of identity. And I feel like that perception of risk is being minimised, as if as long as nobody is trying to kill you then your existential anxiety is irrelevant.

    But it’s not. A sense of identity is a sense of identity, and should not be casually dismissed.
  • I agree that trans people are not a physical danger to me, at least not any more than anyone else is. But I still struggle with the strong feeling that trans ideology is a metaphysical danger to my own sense of identity. And I feel like that perception of risk is being minimised, as if as long as nobody is trying to kill you then your existential anxiety is irrelevant.

    But it’s not. A sense of identity is a sense of identity, and should not be casually dismissed.

    I don't really understand the source of your "existential anxiety". You know you're a man; no-one is saying otherwise. Is your sense of that identity really so fragile that other people being men who don't match your rationalisation of your self-perception is a threat to it?
  • TrudyTrudy Heaven Host
    I agree that trans people are not a physical danger to me, at least not any more than anyone else is. But I still struggle with the strong feeling that trans ideology is a metaphysical danger to my own sense of identity.

    As I've said above, I share a lot of the same questions you do about how we define gender, etc, and find myself having to examine a lot of that in the light of things I hear trans people saying. But this particular "metaphysical danger" is hard for me to understand. To me this feels like "same-sex marriage is a threat to traditional marriage!"

    Having a lesbian couple next door for several years did not in any way impact the traditional heterosexual marriage going on in our house, and I don't see how having a trans woman in my house in any way affects my identity as a cisgender woman. Even if I don't understand or outright disagree with the way someone else identifies, how does that impact my own identity?

    (I realize asking this question takes us in a bit of a circular direction as you've already talked about the identity issue, but the comparison to moral panic over same sex marriage seems very relevant to me. I get to define my relationship, and I get to define my gender, and I'm not sure how anyone else's self-definitions affect mine).
  • I agree that trans people are not a physical danger to me, at least not any more than anyone else is. But I still struggle with the strong feeling that trans ideology is a metaphysical danger to my own sense of identity. And I feel like that perception of risk is being minimised, as if as long as nobody is trying to kill you then your existential anxiety is irrelevant.

    But it’s not. A sense of identity is a sense of identity, and should not be casually dismissed.

    But what do you mean by 'trans ideology'? Trans people aren't an ideology, and trans people also aren't a homogeneous mass who all think the same anyway. Trans people existing doesn't dismiss your identity.

    'Trans ideology' is a phrase used to whip up anti-trans fear, it's not a real thing.
  • I agree that trans people are not a physical danger to me, at least not any more than anyone else is. But I still struggle with the strong feeling that trans ideology is a metaphysical danger to my own sense of identity. And I feel like that perception of risk is being minimised, as if as long as nobody is trying to kill you then your existential anxiety is irrelevant.

    But it’s not. A sense of identity is a sense of identity, and should not be casually dismissed.

    I'm not sure I understand being metaphysically threatened. Or maybe being a progressive who grew up in a conservative small town, or a Christian who lives around an awful lot of secular humanists, I'm so used to the dissonance of difference that it doesn't phase me.

    If seeing people being openly trans or NB makes you question your identity as a cis guy, then that's your question to answer and, I think, nobody short of yourself and/or God could answer it for you. And the only person who can choose to dismiss the question is yourself. I earnestly believe that it's nobody else's business, damned or otherwise.

    But I don't see how "people taking existential questions in directions I wouldn't take" is threatening unless you insist on living in a homogenous world. And I've never felt like I had the luxury of living in one. I'm surrounded by people who operate differently than me. As long as they're not telling me how to act, I don't see any need to feel threatened by it.

    I don't think it's fair to dump my existential anxiety on other people. That burden is entirely my own to bear. I wouldn't want someone else to tell me how to bear it.
  • Bullfrog wrote: »
    But I don't see how "people taking existential questions in directions I wouldn't take" is threatening unless you insist on living in a homogenous world.

    It’s about whether the concepts of “man” and “woman” have any actual meaning. That’s the “ideology” I was talking about - the assertion that those concepts have no definition other than whatever each individual wants them to mean. But if that’s true then it means those concepts are in fact meaningless.
  • Bullfrog wrote: »
    But I don't see how "people taking existential questions in directions I wouldn't take" is threatening unless you insist on living in a homogenous world.

    It’s about whether the concepts of “man” and “woman” have any actual meaning. That’s the “ideology” I was talking about - the assertion that those concepts have no definition other than whatever each individual wants them to mean. But if that’s true then it means those concepts are in fact meaningless.

    I don't think that's quite what is being meant; and in any case, it's not a 'trans ideology' since it's not in any way unique to trans people. Judith Butler for instance is not trans as far as I know. Clearly plenty of cis people just on this thread don't have any issue with it as a way of describing their own gender. How does KarlLB (just as an example) describing his gender differently to you threaten your identity?

    Concepts having different meanings to different people doesn't mean there is no 'real meaning', it just means there's a plurality of interpretations. This is the case for many things - marriage being a prominent example right now. The existence of religious marriages doesn't make civil marriage meaningless or threatened, and vice versa.
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Pomona wrote: »
    Concepts having different meanings to different people doesn't mean there is no 'real meaning', it just means there's a plurality of interpretations.

    Exactly. Think how many versions of Mary there have been over the centuries (see Marina Warner Alone of All Her Sex for a round up). The 'real' Mary is not separable from any of these. In the same way I think there is no 'femaleness' separate from the instances of female personification.
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