4-8% non-cis .... means 4-8% somewhat transsexual? That seems remarkably high? If FTG meant non-het, that seems a little low, but pretty accurate. I remember there was a WaPo article that reported that Kids These Days seem to have higher rates of being non-het, than when we were kids. Esp. women reporting being bisexual and such.
Maybe if you add in all the variations of nonbinary, and/or closeted trans? But I think data collection remains murky. Official surveys still say
Still say <1% trans, that would have been if I had remembered to use HTML for <.
Well, yes. It is totally nuts to suggest a population that was 8% trans "lo these many years ago". I mean, Frederick died in 1786, so things may have been different when he was at school, but I'm sure historians would have noticed.
Yes. It can make data analysis more complicated because of the small n.
Obviously I don't want anyone to put themselves into an identity that doesn't fit them, but certain tasks would get easier if like 8% of everyone was transexual.
My impression is that there's a lot of younger people who identify as non-binary. My running assumption is that the majority of my high school friend group would identify as non-binary if they were kids now, and that this would probably be true of a third of the commenters here as well.
4: Historians have generally been terrible about queer history. I don't know if 8% is a correct figure or not, but there were surely more trans people in the past than we have records of today.
Non-binary I totally get. If the genders are boiled down to Kim Kardashian and J Random Porn Star, then who would want to belong to either? Non-binary seems to me an inevitable and rather healthy reaction to growing up in a porn-saturated culture.
I don't think it's just porn. Gender roles really seem to have narrowed among the sorts who really worry about them most.
America is about two steps away from having automobiles as gendered as underwear.
There really still isn't a lot of data available, but here is the most recent and comprehensive survey we have. In 2017 they estimate 0.6% in the adult US population and 0.7% among teenagers. States like CA run higher at 0.76% adults; DC comes in at 2.77%, which must reflect an urban/rural split of some kind. Call me biased but I think not hard to get to 2% at least when you factor in closeting and egg-ness. 42% of US adults report knowing someone trans, and in my experience knowing someone personally is often a strong precondition for coming out oneself.
The survey questions mentions "gender non-conforming" but not "non-binary," which even four years ago wasn't anywhere near where it is now, so that clearly pushes higher as well.
Gender roles really seem to have narrowed among the sorts who really worry about them most.
I remember seeing articles about that (and maybe it was a previous unfogged thread?):
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a13181/this-70s-lego-pamphlet-encouraged-creativity-over-gender-17461844/
Score one, team LEGO! Redditor fryd_ discovered a 40-year-old note tucked away in a box of LEGOS encouraging children to let their imagination thrive, regardless of traditional gender roles. Girls could build rocketships and boys could build dollhouses, the note said, and what matters is giving them the materials to build whatever their heart desires with LEGOs.
The pamphlet has been authenticated to Quartz by LEGO spokesperson Roar Rude Trangbæk. As io9 mentioned, it also fits in with the companies advertising of the time, which targetted the toy as something fun for children, regardless of gender.
Things have changed for the company since then, and its egalitarian gender roles has waned as they relied increasingly on franchise tie-ins. But at the time, it was quite progressive -- not just to advertise a unisex toy, but to encourage kids to simply let their imagination run wild, regardless of what they wanted to build.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/toys-are-more-divided-by-gender-now-than-they-were-50-years-ago/383556/
Although gender inequality in the adult world continued to diminish between the 1970s and 1990s, the de-gendering trend in toys was short-lived. In 1984, the deregulation of children's television programming suddenly freed toy companies to create program-length advertisements for their products, and gender became an increasingly important differentiator of these shows and the toys advertised alongside them. During the 1980s, gender-neutral advertising receded, and by 1995, gendered toys made up roughly half of the Sears catalog's offerings--the same proportion as during the interwar years.
The codpieces in most kids clothing for boys are where I think the whole thing went off the rails.
10: Agreed that it's not just porn, and that the gendering started as market segmentation in children's toys after about 1980 but I think ubiquitous porn really has changed adolescence and gender roles for the worse.
Also, the sense that the internet brings that you are constantly on display in a global market, not just in the little community of school (and god knows, high school could be bad enough before then).
17.2: Yeah, given the annoying idealization of high school jocks, etc., I'd probably have opted out as a kid, thinking: I might be a man, but I'm not what idiots call "men".
Piss in the frog's mouth like a men.
O shameful my imprecision! Non-cis s/b non-cishet.
Frederick: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/24/gen-z-lgbt/
"1 in 6 Gen Z adults are LGBT. And this number could continue to grow."
Myself, I find this difficult to believe. I mean, American society has been accepting of LGBTQ people for at least a century, so I can't believe that it's only in Gen Z that kids are deciding they can come out to their true identity.
Urk: that last line is supposed come out in the "code" font -- for sarcasm. Ah, well.
Growing up in a typical whitebread small town, I 100% believe this finding, and expect that, as they say, the number could continue to grow. Ain't nuthin' so suffocatin' as small town "morality".
I think my whitebread small town was atypical because about 100% of the uncloseted gay men from it are under indictment for trying to overthrow Joe Biden.
Why, uh, Moby, did you also grow up in East Incest, TX? B/c that's also true of my hometown! 100% of all uncloseted gay men in my H.S. eventually participated in that coup!
An interesting (to me, anyway) conflict that has sprung up around the big upsurge in young people who identify as non-binary is truscums vs tucutes, i.e. transgender people who transitioned medically because of body dysmorphia vs people who identify as trans or non-binary frequently without being visibly anything but their assigned at birth gender. And it's true, I think that there's a surprising number of people, mostly younger, who do especially this latter thing. To the truscums, the tucutes look like they're just trying something on for oppression cred and to the tucutes, the truscums look territorial, conservative, exclusionary.
There's some microcosm of this in the internet controversy involving Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints and a very brief clip she used of trans porn star Buck Angel in one of her generally pretty interesting videos.
There's a person in the AV Club comment section who is obsessed with Natalie Wynn's betrayal. Anything that smacks of being critical of cancel culture will lead to a long rant about how if you say that, then clearly you think what Natalie Wynn did was okay, when objectively she's a monster. The only reason I know about it is reading this person's rants every few days. (Other than this one topic, their comments are normal.)
Did Robert Wagner really kill her?
27: That is something that I find interesting, but I don't know enough to talk about. Like, through my kids I know a couple of AMAB people who use "they" pronouns but otherwise present fairly similarly to cis men, and that does seem to me like something that I would tend to categorize differently than, e.g., a trans woman who presents in a similar way to cis women. Calling both of those situations examples of 'transness' makes it a very big and complex category.
I'm so out of this loop that I had to Google "AMAB".
27/30: It _is_ much more interesting, as a question, than the social media arguments that it generates. The nb person I know best is AFAB and presents as a cis woman to the casual eye but not exactly by choice; their situation is that a) they don't want to medically transition and b) given that constraint, it's hard to look like anything other than a cis woman making androgynous fashion choices, because there isn't exactly a cultural template for "presenting as non-binary" in the way there was for me once I decided to start presenting as a woman. I respect their motivations and certainly don't think of them as trying anything on for cred or lulz, but I also find it in many ways foreign to my own motivations as as a fairly binary trans person.
A lot of the ire around more exclusionary definitions of transness comes from them seeming to recall the more forbidding and gatekeeping medical environment of 15-20 years ago, when the standard clinical picture led to genital surgery, and without committing to that path it was hard to get any treatment or accommodation at all. (Echoes of these bad old days persist in, for example, state laws that won't change the gender on your driver's license unless you submit evidence of surgery.)
"Non-cis" in the OP was apparently a typo but I thought it was a useful way of characterizing a larger and more complex conceptual field than what might be considered "trans" sensu stricto.
AMAB and AFAB are just bullshit. Sex is observed at birth, not assigned. Gender, on the other hand, is to some extent something that society agrees on and constructs. But biological sex is absolutely real and independent of our assignations. Yes there are edge cases, because that's true of all biological categories. But they are very rare indeed.
Sex is observed at birth
Because of smartphones, really you watch anywhere.
I think the old sex/gender distinction has largely disappeared in contemporary usage. People have gender, animals have sex, and you don't ever refer to humans "sex."
"Sex" is just a setting on the dryer.
33: I think the "assigned " refers to something more than just biological sex.
When thinking about the difference between sex and gender I usually think of gender as reflecting the person's identity and presentation. But there is an aspect, independent of personal presentation, of rule-making. There are rules around who gets to have an "M" or "F" on their birth certificate, passport, or driver's license. Who plays in what sports league, or goes to which single sex school. I think that is what is being assigned at birth.
What I wonder about 27, 30 is whether NB identified people who present binary are basically just like me but growing up in a different environment, or whether there's something different between us.
37: Right, society decided from the moment of birth to treat you systematically in a certain way without you having any say in it.
Thinking about it more, it seems to me that the kind of non-binary in 27, 30, is not a way of being trans but rather a way of being cis. We can't just keep narrowing the notion if cisness and define trans as the compliment of that, we should have some diversity of identity within cis identity.
I think 32.1 and 40 are probably very closely related. A woman can dress like she mugged a Carhartt store and still code as a cis woman, but a man wearing anything traditionally female, even just one item out of a whole outfit, codes as trans or non-binary. At least that's why I won't wear running tights.
I mean, also I can't run now. But even back when I could.
Sex is observed at birth, not assigned.
That's news to intersex folks.
A good philosophy paper from 2014 that touches on a lot of this. I like the concept of "moral genitals" as a description of what seems to be at stake when people come down hard on "biological sex is real."
My penis is very moral, but I'm not sure about the left testicle.
43: Genuine intersex/DSD conditions do exist, but they are extremely rare. Nor are they what the trans arguments are about. If physical genital were what people argued about, there wouldn't be any arguments about moral genitals at all: it would all be about the externally verifiable and testable facts of people's bodies. (AMIHMB I have somewhere a paper by a devout evangelical Christian biologist arguing that Jesus could have been produced by a virgin birth, but if that was the case, he would have been intersex(-ish): chromosomally female, but utterly insensitive to the hormones that would have developed his body that way.)
35: If that's the case, and it's certainly true in some parts of the discourse, we need to reinstate it. Because the distinction does exist, and sometimes it matters. I will read the paper Lourdes recommends.
There are rules around who gets to have an "M" or "F" on their birth certificate, passport, or driver's license. Who plays in what sports league, or goes to which single sex school. I think that is what is being assigned at birth. Yes, agreed; but the assignment of gender is made on the basis of an initial observation of sex. It's not arbitrary. It's not even the same as being "assigned American at birth" or "assigned UMC", "assigned Muslim", and so on, all of which also happen and greatly affect life chances.
Very often there is far more at stake in this assignment than there ought to be. But that is a question about the way we treat each other in different societies.
46: the point that "assigned" is making is that while XX and XY by far the most common, the decision to categorize all intersex as one or the other is a social,not biological decision. It's also to push back on the idea of there being a sex "change" (see also "affirmation" vs "reassignment" w.r.t surgery.)
40 and 41 are interesting. At least locally, tweens seem to identify as non-binary when they're not so much feeling a lack of identification with their gender but pushing back on a narrow conception of gender roles. E.g.,you can't be a boy with nail polish, but you can be nonbinary with he pronouns but okay with they. Girls with short hair are non-binary or genderqueer and I think a girl with the same presentation in 1993 would have not thought of herself as rejecting gender, just the stereotype. I don't care much one way or another but I think it's a generational thing.
"The more you tighten your grip, TERF-in, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
NW's comments seem to imply that they are durably hard on the position that there are only two biological sexes with intersex individuals just a bit of noise. But also that issues of gender and trans have nothing to do with this. Gee, I hope that's the case, but smell motte-and-bailey. Nevertheless: here's an open letter by Sophie Grace Chappell to J.K. Rowling, over at Crooked Timber, and particularly a comment by notGoodenough, that address that first point: https://crookedtimber.org/2020/06/14/guest-post-an-open-letter-to-jk-rowling-blog-post-on-sex-and-gender-by-sophie-grace-chappell/#comment-801702
And second: who else are we going to write off as being unworthy of consideration in the way we organize society? How about Down's syndrome people? Maybe a few others ? Why should we invest resources in curing rare protein deficiency disorders, I mean, there are so few sufferers!
I was raised in a "conservative" (== "hypocritical, redneck, racist, misogynist, closed-minded") small town, and it shows in the way my lizard brain operates. But even I can read news articles about intersex individuals and feel that these human beings should be treated decently, and above all, shouldn't be "assigned" at birth. I mean, surgeons cut off the body parts of *infants* to make them conform to some 'assignment'. Christ.
who else are we going to write off as being unworthy of consideration in the way we organize society?
People who use "penultimate" wrong.
Sex is observed at birth, not assigned. Gender, on the other hand, is to some extent something that society agrees on and constructs.
Yeah, this. Sex is the material reality; gender is the ideological superstructure imposed upon that material reality, upon sex. Reifying "gender/gender identity" is just such a bizarre move, after all of the feminist work to denaturalize gender, and to decouple it from sex.
Lynn Conway has done some good careful work that establishes a floor for the population of trans women, back at the start of the '00s. She notes up front that she isn't trying to count trans men, and that it's very much a floor, not a ceiling. Very interesting reading, and a good reminder of how awful a lot of alleged experts in fields of human sexuality are.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html
51-It's a bizarre move from the perspective of late 20th century feminism, but said perspective (which I myself imbibed in grad school) turns out to have been comprehensively defeated. It turns out that "natural" is a word like "freedom"-- everybody wants to carry that banner.
I mean, to my mind, the gender identity vs gender expression dichotomy seems pretty....pre-theoretical. But none of the kids giving HR training sessions across the country care what I think.
All of our HR training was an on-line course.
Just Plain Jane: "Sex is observed at birth, not assigned."
Have you read the many accounts of intersex individuals whose genitals were butchered by doctors at birth, in the process of "assigning" them a gender? This idea that doctors just "observe" .... well, it may be true *today*, but it wasn't true not that long ago in the US, and I sure wouldn't be willing to bet that today, doctors only "observe" and never "assign".
This is illuminating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment#Assignment_in_cases_of_infants_with_intersex_traits,_or_cases_of_trauma
Intersex/DSD people are not trans in the sense that these arguments deal with. You can call this fact whatever you like -- a motte and bailey, a skyscraper, or even greater Los Angeles -- but it remains true. The overwhelming majority of babies' sexes is observed and not assigned. In my experience, it is really not hard to observe in a newborn, though one of my wives mistook the umbilical cord for a very large penis. This was not a failed assignment, but a failure of observation brought about by myopia and stress.
To say that intersex people are a tiny minority is not of course to say that they should be neglected or considered unhuman. The point is that their condition offers no guide to how we should treat and consider those people whose sex was not in the least contestable at birth.
50: yes. They shouldn't be last against the wall.
Cala, I get that the decision to make a hard distinction is social in at least some cases. And I am not in favour of mutilating babies (or eating them). But to say that some -- very few -- people fall between the normal categories of sex doesn't entail that people whose sex is biologically clear can ever change it. Curiously the paper Lourdes recommends, which I still haven't finished reading, contains a very powerful argument against the notion that you can adjust your sex to fit your gender. But I think quoting that would go to far into the weeds.
What you say about non-binary tweens etc makes perfect sense to me.
I'm trying to understand the stakes here. I mean, is it just pedantry?* Is NW objecting to imprecise language? JPJ makes a good stab at answering my question here:
Reifying "gender/gender identity" is just such a bizarre move, after all of the feminist work to denaturalize gender, and to decouple it from sex.
This is a little over my head, though, and I'd appreciate elaboration. The concept of gender dysphoria itself does seem to fly in the face of a type of feminism that I'm onboard with -- but how can I deny the lived experience of other people?
Like Moby, I had to Google AMAB. It sounds to me as though the term isn't really describing something that took place at birth. After all, I was Assigned Male at Birth and I don't think people who use that acronym are talking about me. Am I wrong about that?
*I don't mean to be dismissive of pedants. I myself was assigned pedantic, if not at birth, then near to it.
Are you balls socially constructed or are socially constructed things happening around your balls is the issue.
Someone has to stand up for legacy platforms in data analysis and interpersonal relationships.
60: My sense of the usefulness of terms like AMAB and AFAB is that they're at least in part a way of having discussions like this among people who disagree about fundamental issues without getting hung up on that disagreement immediately.
That is, I do think people using the acronym AMAB are talking about you -- a point of it is to have a category that includes cis men and trans women and some non-binary people, which is useful for some conversations, without committing anyone to concepts like "biologically male" which are not going to be agreed upon by all participants to the conversation.
"What kind of plumbing hookup were you operating when you arrived?"
I've heard that when baby girls pee while uncovered on the changing table, it's less of a disaster.
65: Mostly the belly button one that doesn't work too well anymore.
When the kids were very little, there was a "stretch and grow" program at their daycare, and they'd learn parts of the body and do some exercises. They had one movement where the kids would cheer "Abba-dabba-dominals!!" and pat their stomachs. It was so cute.
(The other one I remember is "Triceps...biceps..." and they'd bend and straighten their arms and make funny faces. And a gluteous maximus one that I can't recall.)
64: Right, the point is to center the conversation around the way that you were treated as a child, rather than body parts. Cis means you want society to treat you as the same gender that it treated you when you were a child, while trans means you want society to treat you as a different gender from that it treated you when you were a child. It's about the gender that society assigned to you as a child, not about "sex."
I think that's a strong point of contention, between people who think "sex"(not taking a strong position here on how to define it) is completely insignificant, and people who think it's a meaningfully important part of the conversation. AMAB and AFAB seem to me to let people who disagree about that have a conversation without immediately resolving that issue one way or the other.
But neither side thinks sex is unimportant: that's why one side wants to talk about it and the other to make it literally unspeakable.
I think in the vast majority of situations sex is far far less important than the gender you were assigned at birth (the only exceptions being around medical care and sports). But at any rate, it seems pretty obvious to me that the way that society treated you during childhood and adolescence is a big fucking deal and is something you need words to talk about. I also think that conversations around "sex" are usually improved by specificity and unbundling (is this about pregnancy? about drug safety testing study design?).
And so it seems that rules around testosterone levels at the Olympics cover track races between 400 meters and a mile*, so two runners cannot compete in their preferred event of the 400M but instead ran the 200M. I'm too gobsmacked to even look up the rationale for that ( and to the extent there is a testosterone advantage it would seem to me to be ab bigger factor in sprints (more strength-based) than endurance.
You know if "excess" natural testosterone is an unfair advantage maybe test males as well.
*I assume there are other events in or out. Who the fuck knows.
72 is correct about the motivation behind terms like AMAB. To say that I was assigned male at birth isn't to say that anyone made a "mistake"; it was a medical determination made on the basis of available evidence, and most people don't encounter such determinations as problematic over the course of their lives.
When you're transgender, the situation is more complex because, as the paper linked in 44 observes, biological sex is a cluster concept based on numerous physical traits that don't always line up as normative. (Yes, intersex cases are rare etc. but honestly not that rare when considered as a proportion not of the general population but of the subset of that population for whom sex or gender is somehow in question.) If someone calls me a "biological male" it's not actually clear what is meant. I have Y chromosomes but not everyone with those chromosomes looks like a guy, even to doctors. I belong to certain medical risk groups but hormone therapy is changing those (my risk of prostate cancer is going down, my risk of breast cancer going up). I have certain equipment in my undies but don't feel that choosing to alter it would involve any more ontological change than a cis woman getting a hysterectomy.
What I unambiguously share with people who don't mind being called biological men is a history of socialization and, prior to starting transition, a certain medical profile. AMAB can capture both but it depends what you're trying to say with it.
The paper linked in 44 argues that to say "I have changed or could change my biological sex" is incoherent in the same way as saying "My biological sex is immutable and I cannot change it." In both cases it's the concept of biological sex that can't bear the load. It's not about trying to erase the empirical data behind sex determination; it's about trying to disaggregate the concept of sex into something more relevant to the question at hand. As 74 points out, in medical research the motives will fall one way; if it's about policing which bathrooms people can use the stakes are different.
Whenever I've seen people feel strongly in a non-pedantic way that sex is a real objective (TM) thing the stakes usually are that they want to make trans people use bathrooms that are dangerous for them, or they want to exclude trans people from some other "single sex" space, etc. I don't see the point of insisting strongly on the objectivity of a category, otherwise. For medical reasons, it makes sense when serving both cis and trans people to be specific about the body part or condition, e.g. people who can get pregnant, specifying the hormone levels, etc., since there are also cis people who don't have uteruses or whatever.
I don't want to make anyone speak for their whole community so I hope there's polling on this or something, but is there like a silent majority of trans people who take the non-pedant position that it doesn't really matter whether one thinks "biological sex" is real or not, so long as everyone is able to use the correct bathrooms, etc?
What it looks like to me is you have some percentage of the cis population (Rowling most prominently) who take the pedant line and can't let it go, and then there are efforts to ostracize them, with varying levels of effectiveness. Then there are (more, I assume) people my quadrant, where you think there's something coherently described by "biological sex" even if it has exceptions or fuzzy borders, but you're not inclined to dig in and be a pedant about it. Is that, like, OK?
77: I think that's a common pattern, but I don't get the impression that's the motivation for NW, so I'm curious to let him explain what he thinks is implied by or at stake in the comment, "The overwhelming majority of babies' sexes is observed and not assigned."
I think he means they just stare at the baby's crotch for a while and probably don't think a whole bunch about it.
78: The 1st para describes me well. I'm pragmatic about the issue: I'm concerned about the consequences of speech to the effect of 'biological sex is real' being weaponized by TERFs. If you're not shouting about it in a way that enables TERF ideology to spread (and BTW, they tend to selectively quote the 'sex is real' part and leave out the part where some people who think sex is real are still against bathroom policing) then I don't really care about your belief that biological sex is a fuzzy category. But I can't speak for all trans people.
(I think biological categories in general are kinda weird anyway and we don't have good criteria for most of them, but speech to the effect of 'sex is real' is unfortunately, in today's context, likely to cause harm in a way that speech to the effect of 'species are real' isn't.)
My personal guess is that "sex is real" combined with opposition to bathroom policing is a substantial majority of the population. There are way more people who don't want to think deeply about someone else's genitals than there are who have even pondered through the implications of sex vs. gender while keeping an open mind.
On reflection, LB, you're right. Meaning is use, and we need a word for your categories however much I dislike the etymology. "Sex is real but it doesn't matter very often" feels like the banner I wanted on anti-Iraq-war demonstrations to distinguish myself from the trots dressed up in fake suicide belts at the front of the march: "Thoughtful imperialists against the war".
In defence of Rowling, she was speaking up for a lawyer who *lost her job* because she said sex was real. I have no idea how this got translated in the American imagination into a generalised hostility towards trans people.
The particulars of the debate are very different in the UK and the US and so are the legal protections on employment. But in England, as the law now stands, you cannot sack anyone just for claiming either that sex is real or that it is a social fiction. And that seems to me the right position.
The whole bathroom thing is not a big issue here: the concrete arguments are over sport, prisons, and rape/domestic violence shelters and centres.
79: Concretely, I think bathroom bills are just performative cruelty.
Conversely I also object very strongly to the use of legal pressures to force people to say things they believe are untrue. This is partly on grounds of principle; partly on political grounds, because if you don't have the means to enforce conformity, you're going to face a hell of a backlash which will lose all that you hoped to gain and more. Nothing more stiffened my views in this than the experience of being hectored and patronised by the Californian wing of the Guardian, or being told that "there is no debate" by a party leader who refused to discuss the matter.
Unfogged remains one of the few places where you can actually ask people what they believe, rather than telling them.
There is a longer essay on all this on substack, if anyone is interested.
I also have long and complicated thoughts on the related subjects of free speech, class, and the struggle for status in higher education which I have not managed to put into a single coherent form.
I find that when I have big thoughts the whole world is a margin.
JK Rowling on bathrooms:
I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman ... then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.
Here is the opinion of Maya Forstater, who, NW tells us, "lost her job because she said sex was real."
"I don't think people should be compelled to play along with literal delusions like 'transwomen are women.' "
Referring to Rowling's support for Forstater, NW says:
I have no idea how this got translated in the American imagination into a generalised hostility towards trans people.
Why is she worried about South Africa?
87-No, silly, you just don't understand the particulars of the debate!
The question at issue in Forstater's case was whether she -- or anyone else who agreed with her -- should lose her job for her opinion. We don't have at will laws. We have employment laws that specifically protect philosophical and religious beliefs. Had she lost, the law would have said that believing transwomen are women (whatever that means) would have become a precondition for employment anywhere. Obviously, this would in practice only have applied to nice middle class jobs. But it's still a remarkable attempt by the state to compel belief about something which is none of its business and has nothing to do with protecting trans people from harm.
89: haha.
The particulars of the debate, which are concealed in pf's modest ellipses. The full quote Rowling quote is importantly different. It goes like this. (omissions italicised)
So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman - and, as I've said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones - then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.
On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to 'become a woman' is to say he's one.
The burden of this argument is not "trans women are rapists". It is "if you change the law as proposed, rapists will declare themselves trans women." This has of course already happened in at least one notorious case (Google Karen White). I'm sure it will happen again and again, so long as the law makes it possible.
If you want to work with any other vulnerable minority you have to pass all sorts of background checks. This is not because all teachers, priests, or youth workers, are potential paedophiles, but because real predators can pretend to be all those things. Allowing any man in the prison estate to declare that they are women and demand to be treated as such simply ignores this principle and makes the exceptionally vulnerable category of female prisoners still more vulnerable.
Again, this is not an argument that all trans people should be treated as their natal sex in prison. That would be utterly inhumane in a culture so full of prison rape jokes as America. The argument is for a legal framework that lets these people be judged and treated on a case by case basis. In that context, self-ID as a legal principle is just too binary.
NW says this:
Concretely, I think bathroom bills are just performative cruelty.
With which I agree. Rowling, however, is a public opponent of transgender use of gender-appropriate bathrooms. I omitted her opposition to existing UK law and the Scottish proposal because it was redundant.
Yet again, here's Rowling (with the Scottish bit still omitted):
So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman - and, as I've said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones - then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.
The Karen White incident, meanwhile, took place in exactly the sort of environment that NW purports to prefer. Quoting NW:
The argument is for a legal framework that lets these people be judged and treated on a case by case basis.
This is exactly the regime under which Young was sent to the wrong prison. "Karen Young" is a (bigoted, stupid) argument against NW's stated position.
I know I should let this lie now that it's fallen off the front page, but maybe someone will come back here and appreciate some additional data.
The Times trumpets "Transgender prisoners are five times more likely to carry out sex attacks!", then clarifies: "Male prisoners who were transferred to women's jails during gender reassignment and women inmates who are transitioning committed seven of the 124 sex attacks recorded between 2010 and 2018." If I understand correctly, The Times is saying that these incidents involved mtf trans and ftm trans inmates both. I would assume these numbers suffer underreporting all round, and in particular I would assume that sexual assault by guards is not addressed.
A 2019 data collection exercise from public and private prisons in England and Wales reports 163 transgender prisoners overall (page 15) and four instances of the specific scenario that troubles Rowling (legally male inmates in a women's prison). "Five times more likely" is a silly extrapolation from such a small n, the analogy ban prevents me from comparing Karen White to other instances of real, sensational, statistically unrepresentative incidents being used as rhetorical props for broadly oppressive practices, and all of us who are concerned for the safety of natal women and girls might want to put our energy toward harm reduction in prisons that would also address the overwhelming majority of assaults not committed by trans people.
the analogy ban prevents me from comparing Karen White to other instances of real, sensational, statistically unrepresentative incidents
Yes, the US discussion of crime committed by immigrants occurred to me also.
The post fell off the front page while I was actually writing my 192. But I was thinking about adding this piece on Rowling-style bathroom silliness.
(And I don't know where I got "Karen Young" in 192. I mean "Karen White," of course.)