Return to Gender 101

[Ari]

Despite it's liberal reputation SF has multiple toilet issues specifically because more conservative views have prevailed. Any toilet system open-air enough not to get used to take drugs is considered too immoral to exist, most nice enough to pass moral muster get used to take drugs in and because safe consumption sites are also too immoral to exist so many users on the street are looking for a safe place to hit up. While there are public toilets and BART has been working to open more of their restrooms, one of the reasons for the infamous 'dirty SF streets' is this battle between public health and morality.

[mickthinks]

Originally Posted by fragment

Sure, we could ascribe to her positions she hasn't actually articulated.

I am not sure why you are interpreting this as me putting words into Rowling's mouth (which misinterpretation I explicitly countered in my opening sentence). Charitable much?

If transwomen who have transitioned and transwomen who have yet to transition are not one and the same, then it is possible to distinguish between them and to support the rights of one while expressing reservations about extending those rights to the other, without denying those rights to transwomen as a group.

Or we could look at what she has actually said and done, ... That's what we are doing here. I'd like to see if I can explain why “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.” does not actually amount to "transwomen shouldn’t be allowed in women’s restrooms" before we move the conversation on to other things Rowling has actually said and done.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by mickthinks

Or we could look at what she has actually said and done, ...

the very next paragraph,

Rowling

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. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

-Rowling is afraid, panicked, not thinking clearly and looking for a way to feel safe.
-Rowling reminds us she is a victim of trans activists.
-Despite a whole paragraph above trying to gain pathos by claiming she sees what trans people go through, we see here that it's really about her feelings and what it would take to make her and the imagined hoards of women she's white knighting for to feel safe in her own head.

As they say, you can't logic your way out of something someone didn't logic their way into, an analysis of her article as a logical piece is bound to fail because it's about her fear of the unknown not about reality.

[fragment]

Originally Posted by mickthinks

* Perhaps some comment or comments elsewhere have shown that Rowling has consciously and culpably crossed the trans exclusionary line. By all means, link to any you know of.

Originally Posted by mickthinks

I'd like to see if I can explain... before we move the conversation on to other things Rowling has actually said and done.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by mickthinks

I am not sure why you are interpreting this as me putting words into Rowling's mouth (which misinterpretation I explicitly countered in my opening sentence). Charitable much?

If transwomen who have transitioned and transwomen who have yet to transition are not one and the same, then it is possible to distinguish between them and to support the rights of one while expressing reservations about extending those rights to the other, without denying those rights to transwomen as a group.

Or we could look at what she has actually said and done, ... That's what we are doing here. I'd like to see if I can explain why “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.” does not actually amount to "transwomen shouldn’t be allowed in women’s restrooms" before we move the conversation on to other things Rowling has actually said and done.

Well, the thing is that you have to explain how you're defining and verifying the boundary between who has transitioned and who has not. And JK Rowling has had many opportunities to do so.

Fact is that some transwomen who are on hormones won't pass. So do they need to carry around evidence of being on hormones? Is it ok if they're on hormones but haven't had surgery?

Some transwomen who have had surgery won't pass. Do they need to present their genitals for inspection? Do they need to get sufficiently large breast implants to convince people that they're really trans women?

Is someone going to be inspecting IDs at the door? How is this enforced? Trans people exist and they don't all pass equally well. And what about cisgender women who look relatively masculine? What about trans men? Which restroom should they use?

If she concedes that the primary threat is from cisgender men, and that trans women are also victimized at a high rate, and that victimization also primarily comes from cisgender men, then her position would be that certain trans women need to be put into the same bathroom with cisgender men, precisely the situation she is decrying as dangerous. Which would be kind of contradictory to her claims to be also concerned about trans women's safety. So it's pretty important to get into the details of whether you're talking about transwomen who have just come out and haven't even started transition, or if you think transwomen on hormones who present as women but haven't had surgery need to be exposed to the presumably greater danger of being in the bathroom where all the cisgender men usually go.

These are obvious follow-ups that Rowling has had plenty of time to address, and hasn't as far as I can tell.

If she wanted to say that you should be required to socially transition, or be on hormones, before you can use the women's bathroom, that would be one thing, but she never comes out and states her position clearly. And I guess the defense you're making now is kind of the whole point of that! But it's been three years - if she wanted to clarify her views, she could. That she doesn't is a deliberate choice and I don't think it's reasonable to interpret her words in the most charitable way possible given that she's had plenty of time to clarify what she meant and has been publicly engaging on this topic (writing thousands of words!) during that time.

It's a bit more likely that she doesn't want to clarify those things because she doesn't want any of them in the women's restroom than that she has a more moderate position that she just refuses to express in any of the many things she's written or said about the subject.

There is also, of course, empirical evidence on the effects of pro-trans policies on bathroom safety. And I don't believe she has been terribly interested in engaging on that topic either.

(And this is aside from a bit more of her other statements and actions that suggest more animosity underlying this than what we're discussing here.)

[seebs]

Last I saw, Posey Parker was accusing David Tennant of being a pedophile on the grounds that he had said that people should stop being assholes to trans kids, and in the process said some straightforwardly false things about things he's done or said, and when people speculated this might be actionable defamation, Rowling offered to pay Parker's legal bills if she was sued for defamation for saying unambiguously false things to paint someone as a pedophile.

I don't think we actually need to do a ton of subtle reading here to figure out whether she's aggressively transphobic and actively working to promote transphobic causes and people.

[beyelzu]

It's a bit more likely that she doesn't want to clarify those things because she doesn't want any of them in the women's restroom than that she has a more moderate position that she just refuses to express in any of the many things she's written or said about the subject.

I’m not sure if Mick was arguing it back then, but Rowling supporters and she herself have been using such possible ambiguity to defend Rowling from the beginning.

Rowling’s anti trans views were first noticed by her likes in other posters.

Maybe the likes didn’t mean anything, how dare people read into them, but people who thought she was anti trans were right.

Rowling is nothing more than a crypto-TERF (in her case she probably does think of herself as a feminist so TERF is more appropriate than in other cases).

Things that hammer nails are hammers (even if those things are rocks), people who argue TERF arguments are de facto TERFs.

I find any arguments that maybe she isn’t to be very much in the sane vein of searching the heart of Klansmen and not finding racism.

[seebs]

She's had lots of opportunities to come out and say "yes, some trans women are validly women and should be allowed in women's restrooms", and I don't think she actually has.

But that said... Actually, yes, I think gender self-ID is valid and that any other policy will, in fact, do more harm than good. I am aware of the alleged concerns, and they're a mix of "interesting philosophical stances I don't find persuasive" and "flagrantly bullshit factual claims".

Like... Imagine that I'm just trying to decide between two policy platforms. One is "let people pee and leave them the fuck alone", and the other is "if anyone is mad at a kid on a sports team, the kid should be legally required to submit to having a doctor stick fingers inside them to perform an internal examination of their genitals to determine what kind of genitals they have, and should not be allowed to opt out of having this done".

So this is a really hard choice; do I want ten-year-olds getting finger-raped because some soccer mom's daughter whined about another girl having more friends, or do I want people to leave everyone the fuck alone?

Which of these policies sounds like a better one to you?

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by fragment

We could do a whole thread for toilet cultural variation.

Such a thread might encourage shitposting.

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by seebs

Last I saw, Posey Parker was accusing David Tennant of being a pedophile [...]

Yikes, for a second I thought you meant Parker Posey.

[seebs]

Oh, huh. It's "Posie Parker" that I mean, and there is also an unrelated "Parker Posey". Weird.

[JoeP]

Parker Posey, Parker McKenna Posey and Posie Parker are unrelated people. Except the latter is the assumed name of a terf shit. Of course Parker works for Penelope.

[seebs]

Yeah, the last one is the only one I'd heard of, entirely for being a particularly shitty TERF.

[JoeP]

Objection! You can't claim Lady Penelope was a terf!

[seebs]

heh. i meant the last one of the posiekers or whatever they are as a class.

[But]

Originally Posted by seebs

I mean, yes? Obviously? Unless your biological/social sex is "not gendered", being "not gendered" does in fact not match your biological/social thing.

Obviously? What about this mush of ideas is obvious? I thought "gender" was supposed to be a "social construct" that had nothing to do with biological sex, so how can you even compare it without a category error?

Like, analogy time: You understand, probably, that people who have a different religion from their parents can have conflict with their parents over that, right? Like, you've probably ever encountered deconverts whose very religious parents are mad at the kid for being non-theistic, right?

And you can say, quite reasonably, that "atheism is not a religion". But that doesn't mean that atheists who have religious parents are not fundamentally having very much the same kind of experience we are referring to when we talk about "have a different religion from your parents".

OK, I guess I'm "agender", I have a biological sex and a sexual orientation, and I don't have a "gender identity", because I haven't a clue what the fuck that's even supposed to mean, but I'm quite sure that my overall experience is very different from that of a trans person.

I don't think it ever actually does. I mean, yeah, gender is basically never entirely coherent, because it's a weird interaction between different tiers of brain function and social interactions and stuff, so obviously it's never gonna really be fully coherent.

The kind of impression I get is of someone trying to fit a carpet that's too big for the room going back and forth, or of a shell game where they keep switching the meaning of words around.

[JoeP]

At least you are honest about not having a clue.

[seebs]

Originally Posted by But

Obviously? What about this mush of ideas is obvious? I thought "gender" was supposed to be a "social construct" that had nothing to do with biological sex, so how can you even compare it without a category error?

Okay, first off: People are not really monolithic. There is totally a "social construct" of gender, but "gender" is more than one thing. "Has nothing to do with" means "is fully independent of, albeit perhaps correlated to", but doesn't mean "isn't talking about a similar category of things".


Mammals have instincts pertaining to sex and tend to have an instinctive awareness that their species comes in types and how they relate to that, most often that they're of one of those types. Our experience of those instincts is what gives us "gender" as a thing to talk about or experience.


The way a given society deals with this is pretty much arbitrary in a lot of ways. For instance, the culture I'm in now tends to associate pink with girls; a hundred years ago, pink was boys. Doesn't matter. It's purely a social construct; neither of those is a Real Thing About Gender.

OK, I guess I'm "agender", I have a biological sex and a sexual orientation, and I don't have a "gender identity", because I haven't a clue what the fuck that's even supposed to mean, but I'm quite sure that my overall experience is very different from that of a trans person.

So, thought experiment: If people think about you as a gender that doesn't match your biological sex, do you care? Like, for some people, "people incorrectly think I'm a girl" is viscerally upsetting, it makes them feel awful. For some people, it's just "haha whatever". Same in the other direction.


Because the former is actually a kind of gender identity, and the distinction between "gender identity" and "biological sex" is that one of them is a claim about who you are, and one of them is a claim about the traits of a piece of meat that you may or may not care strongly about.

The kind of impression I get is of someone trying to fit a carpet that's too big for the room going back and forth, or of a shell game where they keep switching the meaning of words around.

I think the former is pretty accurate. The latter... Less so, once you realize that people disagree about the terminology. There was a time when it was quite popular for people to insist that there was simply no biological component to any of this, that humans simply experienced gender however you taught them to, it was entirely learned and social. And that... just 100% does not turn out to be the case, which is one of those results built on a pile of corpses.


So there's a lot of different things, and they work differently from each other, and we absolutely do not have as many words as we have things happening.


There's "biological sex", which itself is a bit fuzzier than we normally talk about. Sure, there's clearly defined broad categories and "most" people fit pretty neatly into one or the other, but there's actually some exceptions out there. e.g., there's a person who's about 95% XY chromosomes but has some chimerism and who has successfully gotten pregnant and given birth. I've seen one thing about an ordinary guy with normal guy genitals who was discovered to have an unused uterus because biology is actually just fucking drunk. XY androgen-insensitivity is relatively common.


Humans usually experience themselves as male or female in a way which correlates with, but is not interchangeable with, biological sex, even if you just ignore all the edge cases in the biological sex side of things. This experience seems to be instinctive, and for some people it's pretty strong and for other people it's almost entirely inactive, and it doesn't always pick one answer; some people have significant drift over time, some people just never have one, some people tend to have both active at once, and so on.


Culturally, we have a lot of things we correlate-with gender. These things often vary dramatically between cultures. There's no inherent reason that "skirts" are feminine and "pants" are masculine, for instance. There's some broad trends that seem to show up across lots of cultures, but even then, we don't actually know whether there's any reason for that past coincidence or cultural exchanges.


So people who study this stuff end up with a lot of fancy words, like "gender presentation", "gender performance", "gender identity", and so on, which talk about different aspects of the thing and how they relate. And if you're not a specialist, and you're trying to make sense of it, it just sounds like a lot of noise.


I get the same effect when I try to get physics people to tell me what light is. Particle? Yes. Wave? Also yes. And they're talking about distinctions I don't really have a frame of reference for.


But as a practical thing: If you just smile and nod and use whatever pronouns people give you and don't worry about it too much, everything works out fine, and if you fight with people about who they are, they get hurt and no one benefits from this. People having weird claims about gender doesn't create a problem that we need to solve, it can just be there being weird and that's fine.

[seebs]

Was thinking about this more. Consider gynecomastia, which is "men develop boobs" basically.

Many men find this deeply upsetting in a way that I think is not entirely a cultural construct, but rather, they know themselves to be "male", and they know what their body should be like, and this isn't it. Which is why, it turns out, a lot of top surgery is done on cis men.

The thing where they experience their body as mismatching who they are in some way? That, roughly, is a good example of what I mean when I talk about "gender identity". Like, I have any at all of this (gynecomastia, that is; i have slightly more than zero boob, though i don't think i'm even an a cup) and I just... don't care? It's fine. I'm not committed to "boy". I do my nails sometimes too, because I like being sparkly. If I had a button I could press to just instantly swap body types I'd probably hit it a couple of times a day for no particular reason.

And that's a thing about me that is not true of a cis male, and the difference isn't in our obviously-observable biology, but it's not really just a social construct, it's an actual difference in how we relate to our bodies.

[mickthinks]

Replying to Ari, fragment, and erimir:

show spoiler

Originally Posted by Ari

the very next paragraph,

Rowling

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. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

-Rowling is afraid, panicked, not thinking clearly and looking for a way to feel safe.
-Rowling reminds us she is a victim of trans activists.
-Despite a whole paragraph above trying to gain pathos by claiming she sees what trans people go through, we see here that it's really about her feelings and what it would take to make her and the imagined hoards of women she's white knighting for to feel safe in her own head.

As they say, you can't logic your way out of something someone didn't logic their way into, an analysis of her article as a logical piece is bound to fail because it's about her fear of the unknown not about reality.

Originally Posted by fragment

Originally Posted by erimir

Well, the thing is that you have to explain how you're defining and verifying the boundary between who has transitioned and who has not. And JK Rowling has had many opportunities to do so.

Fact is that some transwomen who are on hormones won't pass. So do they need to carry around evidence of being on hormones? Is it ok if they're on hormones but haven't had surgery?

Some transwomen who have had surgery won't pass. Do they need to present their genitals for inspection? Do they need to get sufficiently large breast implants to convince people that they're really trans women?

Is someone going to be inspecting IDs at the door? How is this enforced? Trans people exist and they don't all pass equally well. And what about cisgender women who look relatively masculine? What about trans men? Which restroom should they use?

If she concedes that the primary threat is from cisgender men, and that trans women are also victimized at a high rate, and that victimization also primarily comes from cisgender men, then her position would be that certain trans women need to be put into the same bathroom with cisgender men, precisely the situation she is decrying as dangerous. Which would be kind of contradictory to her claims to be also concerned about trans women's safety. So it's pretty important to get into the details of whether you're talking about transwomen who have just come out and haven't even started transition, or if you think transwomen on hormones who present as women but haven't had surgery need to be exposed to the presumably greater danger of being in the bathroom where all the cisgender men usually go.

These are obvious follow-ups that Rowling has had plenty of time to address, and hasn't as far as I can tell.

If she wanted to say that you should be required to socially transition, or be on hormones, before you can use the women's bathroom, that would be one thing, but she never comes out and states her position clearly. And I guess the defense you're making now is kind of the whole point of that! But it's been three years - if she wanted to clarify her views, she could. That she doesn't is a deliberate choice and I don't think it's reasonable to interpret her words in the most charitable way possible given that she's had plenty of time to clarify what she meant and has been publicly engaging on this topic (writing thousands of words!) during that time.

It's a bit more likely that she doesn't want to clarify those things because she doesn't want any of them in the women's restroom than that she has a more moderate position that she just refuses to express in any of the many things she's written or said about the subject.

There is also, of course, empirical evidence on the effects of pro-trans policies on bathroom safety. And I don't believe she has been terribly interested in engaging on that topic either.

(And this is aside from a bit more of her other statements and actions that suggest more animosity underlying this than what we're discussing here.)

Right from the beginning I have taken up two separate but related positions here with regard to JK Rowling's alleged antitrans beliefs and statements. The first is that JKR is not anti-trans, and the second is that JKR's words have been widely misinterpreted and misrepresented to make it seem she is anti-trans—which is a form of injustice which I think we should all care more about, in practice and in principle.

I think i have been clear that I accept I may be wrong about the first and in that regard I am open to persuasion in the form of reliable evidence of Rowling's own words and deeds. But the very first evidence that has been provided here in response to my questioning the anti-trans accusation strikes me as a clear case of the kind of misrepresentation at the heart of the second issue.

So, naturally a tension arises between my readiness to consider new evidence that I am wrong on the first issue and that Rowling is indeed anti-trans—and my unwillingness to move on past the first evidence. If I appear to be rejecting new evidence, that is only in regard to the second issue,"Is Rowling being misrepresented?", for which these words of hers have become a test case:

JK Rowling wrote:
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.

Now it seems to me clear that, whatever you believe about Rowling's actual position on the wider issues of trans rights, and also whatever criticism you might have, no matter how valid, of her conclusions or the arguments she uses, it is simply not the case that this quote can reasonably be read as "JKR doesn't want any trans women in women's bathrooms". That is because:

Originally Posted by mickthinks

IIf transwomen who have transitioned and transwomen who have yet to transition are not one and the same, then it is possible to distinguish between them and to support the rights of one while expressing reservations about extending those rights to the other, without denying those rights to transwomen as a group

And yes, there is a problem specifying where the boundary between transitioned and not transitioned might lie and even more of a problem doing so in a way that generates wide agreement. But, for the purposes of explaining why it is wrong to read "any man who believes or feels he is a women" as "all transwomen", specifying where or how to draw the line is not required. That there is, or even that there might be a line means that some transwomen might be on the other side of it from some men who believe or feel they are women.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by mickthinks

that is only in regard to the second issue,"Is Rowling being misrepresented?", for which these words of hers have become a test case:

Yes it is nice that you're giving her the benefit of the doubt and that we're mostly analyzing work published on her curated professional website.

Unfortunately when the internet talks about JK Rowling, they more often than not mean the angry Twitter/X poster that gets into fights with people. I refuse to make an X account but this exchange was posted on reddit and X still seems spidered by google so I confirmed it's accurate. I too wish she wasn't angry at people on twitter.

Twitter two days ago

Zachary: I agree, treating trans women like predators when they're statistically far more likely to be victims is indeed disgusting. We shouldn't be treating women this way.

JK Rowling: Good for you, Zachary. Some rapists' rights activists prefer to do their misogyny from behind an anime cartoon, but you're proudly doing it under your own name. Just don't go looking for any facts that might contradict your fallacious argument. Rapists need brave guys like you.

[fragment]

Originally Posted by mickthinks

it is simply not the case that this quote can reasonably be read as "JKR doesn't want any trans women in women's bathrooms"

for the purposes of explaining why it is wrong to read "any man who believes or feels he is a women" as "all transwomen"

Has anyone made claims about JKR's prejudice using these universals? Or is it more charitable to read them as "JKR doesn't want many, probably most, trans women in women's bathrooms, with a few exceptions like her one black trans friend who is one of the good ones"?

[seebs]

I have not actually seen any evidence of Rowling specifically advocating for respecting the experiences of identity of even one trans woman. Maybe she has, but I haven't seen it.

[fragment]

She does in the piece from which the bit which we've been discussing comes from. It's literally "I accept my one trans friend who did all the things I deem right and proper for acceptance". She wants to go back to the days where a rather small number of trans people who had privileged access to psychologists and surgeons could go through a many years long process of demonstrating continued major distress at dysphoria before enough specialists would deign to sign off permission for surgery and hormones. Then she might accept those trans women in bathrooms.

Originally Posted by JKR

Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass.

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues - J.K. Rowling

[seebs]

Okay, that sorta tracks. Having known people who made it through all that gatekeeping... It did nothing of any value. It just hurt people for a long time for no reason.