Well, after a full day of being discussed, misrepresented, and called the usual things, I got bored of trying to answer everyone individually.
So I built a machine instead.
Amazing how trans-identified men claim to be a woman, and yet hate us so much. The hate comes only from that direction, which is why we dont want you in our spaces. I've never heard a TERF speak with the same level of vitriol towards a trans-identified person, than I have a trans-identied male speak towards actual women. It's the hate that gets you.
There are two claims in there and they want separating.
The first is empirical. Hate runs one way only, and your evidence is that you have never heard a gender critical woman speak with the same vitriol. That is a claim about what you have heard, which is not the same thing as a claim about what has been said. I spent months on X under my own name and I could tell you what I heard, and my impression would be worth exactly what yours is, which is nothing. Neither of us has produced a measurement. If you want this to be an evidential argument I'm very happy to have it, but then it has to be evidence rather than recollection.
The second claim is the one that matters, and you have walked straight past it. Grant me that I lose the first one. Suppose trans women are, on average, ruder to you than you are to us. What follows? Rudeness is not a safeguarding criterion. We do not allocate access to public facilities on the basis of who has been politest in an argument, and if we did, half of Liverpool would be barred from the swimming baths.
So the hate, even granted in full, does no work at all. It explains why you don't like me. It establishes nothing about risk, nothing about rates, and nothing about what exclusion costs, which were the three things actually in dispute.
"transwomen", compound word like "crayfish" which ain't. 😉🙂
That you're starting off on a false premise is something of a black mark against you, right out of the chute. There is, maybe, no intrinsic problem in trying to shape one's body to resemble that of the other sex. But to claim that one has actually changed sex? Kind of crossing the Rubicon into crazy town.
Crayfish is a good example and it doesn't do the work you want. Nobody has ever been kept out of a building over a compound noun.
You've answered a question about risk with a point about orthography, in the comments of an essay about answering questions about risk with points about definitions. I'd have charged you for the demonstration.
And for the third time on this page, I'm not claiming to have changed sex. Sex is binary. I was born male. No surgeon altered it. The premise you've marked as false is one you'll need to find somebody else to hold, because I keep conceding it and you keep winning it back off me.
Suppose was doing real work in that sentence. It was your claim, granted for the sake of argument, so that I could ask what followed from it. You've quoted the granting and skipped the question. What follows?
I rather doubt that olde Stevie is willing to consider that the thugs and psychotics there are a big part, if not most of his tribe. Kinda think it gets down into what transwoman Anne Lawrence called the "Shame and Narcissistic Rage in Autogynephilic Transsexualism":
People tend to react rather badly on being disabused of their delusions and illusions -- "No!!! Say it isn't true!!"🙄. Not for nothing did Blaise Pascal say:
BP: "Men [and transwomen ...] never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
I haven't opened the links, so I'll take the argument as you've put it here.
A catalogue of hate, granted in full, establishes that some people who share a label with me are vile. I wouldn't dispute it for a second. Every population of any size has its thugs and mine is not exempt. You then make it an argument about me by way of the word tribe, which is not evidence. It's a filing system.
The Lawrence material does something worse, because it cannot be wrong. If I argue back, that is the narcissistic rage. If I go quiet, that is the shame. A theory that reads every available response as confirmation has stopped being a theory and become a mood.
And grant me the lot of it. Suppose I am precisely the specimen you take me for, motives and all. The rate at which harm has actually occurred, what exclusion costs, and how the two weigh against each other are all exactly where they were before you posted. You have gone to considerable trouble over my psychology and none at all over the proposition.
"You have gone to considerable trouble over my psychology and none at all over the proposition."
Quite a bit of "interesting" "psychology" there which I've spent some time digging into. And some transwomen seem to still manage to sail on a more or less even keel after their "transitions". Lynn Conway for example, Deirdre McCloskey, Candice Brown Elliott, Anne Lawrence, and Joan Roughgarden.
But none of them have actually managed to changed their sex, to replace their testicles with some ovaries of their own which are pretty much the sine qua non to qualify as a female, and across literally millions of species over several billion years.
As for your "proposition", the only one that seems relevant seems to be that you can change sex. A medical and biological impossibility. Perchance you have some case studies of some dudes replacing their testicles with ovaries of their own?
You've told me which proposition you'd like me to be defending, which is a tidy way of not answering the one I put.
I don't claim to have changed sex. No ovaries, no gametes, no case studies, and none coming. Take it. It's the fourth time I've handed it over and each handover seems to make you keener to win it.
What you've called the only relevant proposition isn't relevant to anything here. It doesn't tell you what risk I pose, or how often harm has actually occurred, or what it costs to keep a fifty seven year old woman out of the lavatory in Boots. Those are the questions. Gametes are silent on all of them, and have been for several billion years.
On your list, you've named a run of trans women who got on with their lives perfectly well after transition and offered it as though it told against me. I'd have put that one on my side of the ledger.
Mate, they are just being polite, thats what women do 🤣 Also, your bunch have created laws so that women who don't agree are taken to court, which is pretty good incentive to lie... like I said, compelled speech isn't really acceptance is it? And also, when you say I'm secretly a man, does that mean that sex is binary? I thought sex was just some white colonial invention (or something), i don't quite get how if sex is not binary you must be a woman if your not a man...? It's very confusing to be a TERF.
You've caught somebody else's argument and handed me the bill for it.
I think sex is binary. Two gametes, no third. I was born male, I don't produce ova, and no surgeon in Thailand or Seoul or London altered that fact. You will not get an argument out of me about sex being a white colonial invention, because I don't believe it and never have. So the incoherence you're enjoying is real, it just isn't mine. You've found the silliest version of the case, beaten it, and treated the question as settled.
Here is the version you would actually have to argue with. Grant every biological claim you have. All of them, no haggling. Now show me the step that gets you from she is male to therefore she must be kept out of the changing room. That step is the one your side never does. It is assumed to arrive free with the biology and it doesn't. A fact about gametes tells you nothing about how often harm has actually occurred, or what it costs to keep a fifty seven year old woman out of a toilet in Boots, or how a serious country weighs one against the other.
On compelled speech I half agree with you, which may be a disappointment. Nobody was ever made kinder by a court. Call me what you like. But notice that isn't what's on the table, because the argument was never really about the vocabulary.
That's the first real attempt anybody has made at the step, so credit where it's due. I haven't opened the link, but I know what freedom of association is and I'll take it as you meant it.
The trouble is that it proves a great deal more than you want it to. Applied without qualification it gets you the golf club that won't have Jews, the boarding house with the sign in the window, the lunch counter that serves whom it likes, and the employer who'd rather not. We spent most of the last century deciding it doesn't run all the way down in public accommodation, and you wouldn't accept it as a defence in any of those cases either.
So it isn't the principle doing the work. It's a prior judgement that this particular exclusion is one of the reasonable ones, with the principle wheeled in afterwards to make it look derived. That judgement is exactly the step I asked you to show me, and you've posted it as a hyperlink.
Also, a changing room in Marks and Spencer isn't an association. Nobody is asking to join anything. I want to try a dress on and go home.
Stevie: Applied without qualification it gets you the golf club that won't have Jews, the boarding house with the sign in the window, the lunch counter that serves ...
Public services are rather different from private ones, ones explicitly for narrow segments of the population. For example, businesses selling food might reasonably be obliged to provide that service to all members of the public. And public services explicitly for members of particular categories -- kids clothing, school-year starting soon -- might reasonably decline to try fitting older people -- or, maybe, some hulking pedophile -- into their wares.
And there are things like the recent quite risible Giggle vs Tickle case. But that case turns much of the judiciary -- at least the Australian one although many American, British, and Canadian ones are no better -- into a bunch of ignorant clowns -- where the proprietor-ess, one Sall Grover, of a media application, the aforementioned "Giggle For Girls [for goofy gals?]" was obliged to pay some "10,000 plus costs" because Grover had -- quite reasonably, at least in my book -- declined to let "Miss" "Roxanne" -- Tess -- Tickle use her media platform and Internet application.
The Guardian: Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle wins discrimination case after being banned from women-only app
Your last line is mine. Freedom of association is clearly not a get-out-of-jail-free card. That was the whole of my objection, so we agree, and it leaves the principle doing none of the work. What's doing the work is the qualification, and the qualification is the thing I asked you to show me.
The public and private distinction is the right shape for it, mind, and I'd take it seriously. It just doesn't go where you need it to go. The case actually in dispute is a lavatory in Boots and a changing room in Marks and Spencer, both of them retail premises open to anybody with a bus fare. On your own taxonomy those are the lunch counter, not the golf club.
The children's clothing shop isn't the example you want either. It doesn't refuse to serve adults, and it would go under in a fortnight if it did, since adults are the ones holding the money. What it declines to do is fit a grown woman into a garment cut for a six year old, which is a fact about the stock rather than a rule about the door. Nobody is stopped on the way in and asked to account for themselves. That is exactly the difference I keep pointing at, and your example sits on my side of it.
The hulking paedophile I'll mention once. Take it out of the sentence and the sentence is unchanged. It carries no weight, it establishes nothing, and it is sitting in a paragraph addressed to me. You argue better than that when you bother.
Now Giggle, because you've chosen the one case that has moved a long way since your link.
The Guardian piece is August 2024 and the ten thousand is the first instance figure. In May of this year the Full Federal Court dismissed Grover's appeal, allowed Tickle's cross appeal, reclassified the conduct as two acts of direct rather than indirect discrimination, and doubled the damages to twenty thousand. Last Thursday the High Court refused special leave, with costs. That is three benches.
So your solid example of justified application is a case in which every court that has looked at it has held that the application was not justified. That isn't an example. It's a grievance, and you're entitled to it, but it cannot be your evidence and your objection at the same time.
And Giggle is a private application with one stated purpose. Grant me nothing. Grant that every judge involved was a clown. It still doesn't reach a chemist's on a Friday afternoon. You have answered the easiest case in the argument by reaching for the hardest one you could find.
Which leaves your own distinction, and I'd like you to finish it, because it's the best thing either of us has put on this page. Food for everybody. Children's clothes cut for children. Fine. Now place the lavatory in Boots. What is it for, such that I defeat the purpose of it by using it and washing my hands?
If I may stick my nose in here, the trouble is that the way the law works means that letting you try a dress in in an M&S changing room (something I personally would have no problem with) also allows men with functioning penises into rape crisis centres. Having been raped, I can attest that this would have driven me mad.
Yes, men are raped too, which is horrible. Yes, of course, not all men are rapists. But this is the basis of women's sex-based rights, and I believe it outweighs your desire to try on a dress.
And I say this as someone who has always had gender-nonconforming friends. I wish you well in your life, and hope that you will be happy.
Thank you for writing that, and I'm sorry for what's sitting behind it. I'm not going to sit here and tell you a rape crisis centre and a changing room in M&S are the same room, because they plainly aren't.
The premise doing the work in your comment is that they come as a set. One rule for every door, so the hardest case settles the easiest one. If that's right then you've won and there's nothing much left to say.
But nothing else works that way. We don't run one rule for a nightclub and a doctor's surgery, or for a prison and a swimming pool. Different places have different facts in them and get different answers, and a refuge working out who it can safely take in is doing exactly that, and has been doing it for a very long time, without anybody first having to settle what happens in Marks and Spencer.
What I'd resist is the direction of travel. The argument nearly always starts at the hardest door, because that's where it's strongest, and then walks the result back down the corridor to the lipstick counter. That's the move. It's also why the changing room never actually gets discussed on its own terms.
And thank you for the last line. It's rarer than it ought to be.
But the trouble is that once the sex discrimination laws apply, different places may NOT work out who they can safely take in. If it is decreed that a whole man who declares himself a woman is jn.law a woman, he cannot then be excluded from any women's space, be it M&S changing rooms or a rape crisis centre. Choice is deliberately removed.
Glad you've weighed-in, some good points, many of which I agree with.
The Big Problem, as you suggest, is of people "sailing under false flags", the potential for fraud and a bait and switch; surprise, surprise, surprise. Ha, ha, and all that.
But kind of reminds me of a bit of Biblical lore -- Peter ... -- that had it that it is "an abomination unto the Lord that" people wear the clothes typical of the other sex. Or words to that effect:
Deuteronomy 22:5; King James Version:
5 The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.
Whether such "cross-dressing" is an "abomination" or not, there are practical matters in regulating who has access to which services and opportunities, to equitable treatment in a wide variety of situations.
Thank you. This is an honest tool also. If you try a question something like this below, where you actually put your case forward, it will give you a totally fair hearing and a green pass. It's not looking for wrong arguments. It's looking for bad arguments, bullshit arguments. It is a bullshit detector.
"I think some settings, such as prisons or high-dependency care environments, raise real safeguarding questions. I would want individual risk assessment, clear evidence, and practical safeguards rather than either blanket inclusion or blanket exclusion."
Fun to play with - tried using a TERF argument, then expanded on it but couldn't get a passing grade. Probably because any argument they use is pure BS and I just don't care enough to go to ugly parts of the web to find fake 'proof' that they use, if they ever do use proof - I've yet to see anything beyond that idiotic web site that says getting a participation trophy is 'stealing' from cis women.
That's roughly what I'd hoped. It isn't grading you on whether it agrees with you, it's grading whether the answer actually addresses the question that was asked. Which turns out to be quite a hard test to pass if you're arguing in bad faith, and an easy one if you aren't.
Funny how you can't find any proof and in the same breath say you've never bothered looking for any... anyway, the point is, most women will never agree that men are women and there is the crux. You can argue and build digital toys and litigate and cancel people to your hearts content but you just cannot control what people think, ever. And if scaring people into using compelled speech us what passes for acceptance for you, well thats not genuine acceptance really is it? So, you can't win that way either. And that's why you need the kids on board isn't it? Take advantage of their innocence and credulity, get them while they're young and gullible. And we women, the real ones, we see you for who you are, which explains the hate. Because we are right. And you know it. Just call yourselves gender non-conforming men, and we'll leave you alone. But also, stay away from or kids and our spaces.
Taking the argument first, because there is one in there.
You're quite right that you cannot legislate a belief, and I've never wanted to. I have never once asked you to think I'm a woman. I'd be wasting both our afternoons. What I want is duller than that. Buy a lipstick, use a toilet, hold a passport, be left alone. None of it requires your agreement, which is just as well, because I'm not going to get it.
Then there's the head count, which cuts the other way from the way you've swung it. What people currently believe is a fact about opinion and no fact at all about what anybody is owed. Public feeling is the very last place I'd go looking for the answer to a question like this, and you wouldn't accept it as a method either the moment it stopped going your way.
And then there's the last bit, which isn't an argument and you know it isn't. It's the oldest line in the drawer, pointed at whichever group is currently inconvenient, and it does the same job every time. It ends the conversation without anybody having to win it. I'm not going to perform being wounded by it. I'm simply not going to treat it as a premise.
And your proof of that? Oh yeah, there is none. I'm Canadian so I care about the views here - https://angusreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023.09.19_Gender_Trans_issues.pdf shows on page 6 that a slim majority of young women (18-34) support the statement that anyone who wishes to identify as a woman is in fact a woman. In fact, if you check 35% of all respondents agree with that, more than feel your TERF views are right. In no age/gender group is your view the majority view. NONE. In fact the only groups that feels more your way than mine is cis men. Funny - you agree with men while women are on my and Stevie's side. Maybe you are a secretly a man posing under a woman's alias in order to get noticed?
So you're full of it. The hate has grown lately thanks to mega rich scum like Musk (due to his daughter being trans) and JKR (who I suspect is a self hating closeted trans man due to assorted factors). Sadly we don't have any mega billionaires on our side (often to become that rich you need to be a bit of a scumbag anyways). Enjoy living in hate, while us trans women live a happy life laughing at sad little people like you.
That's rather more homework than I've ever put into one of these threads myself, and it's appreciated. I leave the polling fights to people who enjoy them more than I do, but it's good to know the numbers are behind us anyway.
You're a 60 year old man who started acting out your male fantasy idea of women since a couple of months ago. You have literally nothing of value to say on women's rights.
You might have more credibility if your bio said that you "Came out as a transwoman, as a male transvestite in 2026"
You and old Stevie might consider this old post from Michelle Goldberg where she interviewed transwoman "Helen Highwater" who called your and Stevie's mantra and article of faith -- i.e., “trans women are women” -- a "vicious lie". It's been quite some time since a bigger Big Lie, and more batshit crazy idea has come down the pike:
QUOTE; Slate; Michelle Goldberg: The Trans Women Who Say That Trans Women Aren’t Women; Meet the apostates of the trans rights movement. Dec 09, 2015
Yet [he, Highwater] has come to reject the idea that [he] is truly female or that [he] ever will be. Though “trans women are women” has become a trans rights rallying cry, Highwater writes, it primes trans women for failure, disappointment, and cognitive dissonance. [He] calls it a “vicious lie.” .... UNQUOTE
Goldberg had linked to a blog post by Highwater, though it had been deleted, probably by the "Tranish Inquisition". But I did run across an archive of it which is rather illuminating reading:
An argument from testimony, and one you would not accept for a second in the other direction.
One trans woman says the phrase is a vicious lie. Granted, she said it. Now find me a gender critical woman who changed her mind and watch how quickly a single defector stops settling anything. Highwater is authoritative about Highwater. That is the entire extent of it, and you would say exactly the same to me if I tried it on you.
It is also a claim about a slogan rather than a policy, and you have picked the one part of this I would hand you for nothing. I am not especially wedded to trans women are women as a sentence. I have written in print that in one narrow biological sense the opposite is true, and that I don't need metaphysical perfection from the universe before I am allowed to exist with dignity.
So you have demolished the bit I was never defending, and the question I actually put remains standing and unanswered.
Thank you for this. It is, in its way, a perfect specimen.
The article argues that anti-trans replies often avoid the actual question by substituting a more emotionally convenient one. The tool was then built to test precisely that habit: does the reply answer the claim on the table, or does it run sideways into a slogan, a vibe, or a proxy grievance?
And here you are, kindly demonstrating the mechanism in the wild.
The question was not: “Do you enjoy the title?”
Nor was it: “Do you personally approve of my career?”
Nor even: “Can you assemble a mood board of things you associate with men?”
The question was whether the argument actually answers the policy point being made.
Instead, you have offered:
1. the title sounds naughty to you, therefore male;
2. programming is associated with men, therefore male;
3. disagreement makes conversation uncivil, therefore male;
4. my website has checklists, therefore male.
This is not an argument. It is a rummage through a handbag of stereotypes.
The programming point is especially charming. We appear to have arrived at a feminism in which women must be encouraged into STEM, unless a trans woman is already there, in which case technical competence becomes suspiciously unfeminine. One does admire the flexibility. It must be tiring to keep moving the principle around like that.
As for “very male”, this is not analysis. It is a decorative stamp applied after the fact. You could have written the same conclusion after any premise whatsoever:
“She codes.” Very male.
“She argues.” Very male.
“She builds a website.” Very male.
“She replies.” Very male.
“She breathes through the nose rather than the gills.” Very male.
At some point, the conclusion is no longer being reasoned towards. It is merely being protected from contact with evidence.
Which, rather neatly, is what the essay was about.
So thank you. Truly. I could not have asked for a cleaner demonstration. The machine was built to identify the moment when an answer stops addressing the question and starts laundering discomfort through a more respectable-looking complaint.
Oh my, that was a great parody of a TERF. Oh wait, you were serious???? Even funnier. Computer programming for years was dominated by women, until men decided it was valuable. So basically calling it a sign of being male is pure misogyny. Weird to say writing out ones viewpoint is male, given YOU wrote out a response. Sounds like you are a guy hiding behind a female name online based on your criteria. Sigh. Arguing with a person like you is a waste of time, as I doubt you have listened to anyone in an effort to learn since elementary school.
Amazing how trans-identified men claim to be a woman, and yet hate us so much. The hate comes only from that direction, which is why we dont want you in our spaces. I've never heard a TERF speak with the same level of vitriol towards a trans-identified person, than I have a trans-identied male speak towards actual women. It's the hate that gets you.
There are two claims in there and they want separating.
The first is empirical. Hate runs one way only, and your evidence is that you have never heard a gender critical woman speak with the same vitriol. That is a claim about what you have heard, which is not the same thing as a claim about what has been said. I spent months on X under my own name and I could tell you what I heard, and my impression would be worth exactly what yours is, which is nothing. Neither of us has produced a measurement. If you want this to be an evidential argument I'm very happy to have it, but then it has to be evidence rather than recollection.
The second claim is the one that matters, and you have walked straight past it. Grant me that I lose the first one. Suppose trans women are, on average, ruder to you than you are to us. What follows? Rudeness is not a safeguarding criterion. We do not allocate access to public facilities on the basis of who has been politest in an argument, and if we did, half of Liverpool would be barred from the swimming baths.
So the hate, even granted in full, does no work at all. It explains why you don't like me. It establishes nothing about risk, nothing about rates, and nothing about what exclusion costs, which were the three things actually in dispute.
" Suppose trans women are, on average ..."
"transwomen", compound word like "crayfish" which ain't. 😉🙂
That you're starting off on a false premise is something of a black mark against you, right out of the chute. There is, maybe, no intrinsic problem in trying to shape one's body to resemble that of the other sex. But to claim that one has actually changed sex? Kind of crossing the Rubicon into crazy town.
Crayfish is a good example and it doesn't do the work you want. Nobody has ever been kept out of a building over a compound noun.
You've answered a question about risk with a point about orthography, in the comments of an essay about answering questions about risk with points about definitions. I'd have charged you for the demonstration.
And for the third time on this page, I'm not claiming to have changed sex. Sex is binary. I was born male. No surgeon altered it. The premise you've marked as false is one you'll need to find somebody else to hold, because I keep conceding it and you keep winning it back off me.
Suppose was doing real work in that sentence. It was your claim, granted for the sake of argument, so that I could ask what followed from it. You've quoted the granting and skipped the question. What follows?
> "It's the hate that gets you."
Pretty "spectacular", isn't it? You no doubt have seen the TerfIsA_Slur webpage, but it gives chapter and verse on that hate:
https://terfisaslur.com/
I rather doubt that olde Stevie is willing to consider that the thugs and psychotics there are a big part, if not most of his tribe. Kinda think it gets down into what transwoman Anne Lawrence called the "Shame and Narcissistic Rage in Autogynephilic Transsexualism":
https://annelawrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Lawrence-2008-shame-and-narcissistic-rage.pdf
People tend to react rather badly on being disabused of their delusions and illusions -- "No!!! Say it isn't true!!"🙄. Not for nothing did Blaise Pascal say:
BP: "Men [and transwomen ...] never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/blaise_pascal_133606
I haven't opened the links, so I'll take the argument as you've put it here.
A catalogue of hate, granted in full, establishes that some people who share a label with me are vile. I wouldn't dispute it for a second. Every population of any size has its thugs and mine is not exempt. You then make it an argument about me by way of the word tribe, which is not evidence. It's a filing system.
The Lawrence material does something worse, because it cannot be wrong. If I argue back, that is the narcissistic rage. If I go quiet, that is the shame. A theory that reads every available response as confirmation has stopped being a theory and become a mood.
And grant me the lot of it. Suppose I am precisely the specimen you take me for, motives and all. The rate at which harm has actually occurred, what exclusion costs, and how the two weigh against each other are all exactly where they were before you posted. You have gone to considerable trouble over my psychology and none at all over the proposition.
"You have gone to considerable trouble over my psychology and none at all over the proposition."
Quite a bit of "interesting" "psychology" there which I've spent some time digging into. And some transwomen seem to still manage to sail on a more or less even keel after their "transitions". Lynn Conway for example, Deirdre McCloskey, Candice Brown Elliott, Anne Lawrence, and Joan Roughgarden.
But none of them have actually managed to changed their sex, to replace their testicles with some ovaries of their own which are pretty much the sine qua non to qualify as a female, and across literally millions of species over several billion years.
As for your "proposition", the only one that seems relevant seems to be that you can change sex. A medical and biological impossibility. Perchance you have some case studies of some dudes replacing their testicles with ovaries of their own?
You've told me which proposition you'd like me to be defending, which is a tidy way of not answering the one I put.
I don't claim to have changed sex. No ovaries, no gametes, no case studies, and none coming. Take it. It's the fourth time I've handed it over and each handover seems to make you keener to win it.
What you've called the only relevant proposition isn't relevant to anything here. It doesn't tell you what risk I pose, or how often harm has actually occurred, or what it costs to keep a fifty seven year old woman out of the lavatory in Boots. Those are the questions. Gametes are silent on all of them, and have been for several billion years.
On your list, you've named a run of trans women who got on with their lives perfectly well after transition and offered it as though it told against me. I'd have put that one on my side of the ledger.
Mate, they are just being polite, thats what women do 🤣 Also, your bunch have created laws so that women who don't agree are taken to court, which is pretty good incentive to lie... like I said, compelled speech isn't really acceptance is it? And also, when you say I'm secretly a man, does that mean that sex is binary? I thought sex was just some white colonial invention (or something), i don't quite get how if sex is not binary you must be a woman if your not a man...? It's very confusing to be a TERF.
You've caught somebody else's argument and handed me the bill for it.
I think sex is binary. Two gametes, no third. I was born male, I don't produce ova, and no surgeon in Thailand or Seoul or London altered that fact. You will not get an argument out of me about sex being a white colonial invention, because I don't believe it and never have. So the incoherence you're enjoying is real, it just isn't mine. You've found the silliest version of the case, beaten it, and treated the question as settled.
Here is the version you would actually have to argue with. Grant every biological claim you have. All of them, no haggling. Now show me the step that gets you from she is male to therefore she must be kept out of the changing room. That step is the one your side never does. It is assumed to arrive free with the biology and it doesn't. A fact about gametes tells you nothing about how often harm has actually occurred, or what it costs to keep a fifty seven year old woman out of a toilet in Boots, or how a serious country weighs one against the other.
On compelled speech I half agree with you, which may be a disappointment. Nobody was ever made kinder by a court. Call me what you like. But notice that isn't what's on the table, because the argument was never really about the vocabulary.
Stevie: Now show me the step that gets you from she is male to therefore she must be kept out of the changing room.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_association
That's the first real attempt anybody has made at the step, so credit where it's due. I haven't opened the link, but I know what freedom of association is and I'll take it as you meant it.
The trouble is that it proves a great deal more than you want it to. Applied without qualification it gets you the golf club that won't have Jews, the boarding house with the sign in the window, the lunch counter that serves whom it likes, and the employer who'd rather not. We spent most of the last century deciding it doesn't run all the way down in public accommodation, and you wouldn't accept it as a defence in any of those cases either.
So it isn't the principle doing the work. It's a prior judgement that this particular exclusion is one of the reasonable ones, with the principle wheeled in afterwards to make it look derived. That judgement is exactly the step I asked you to show me, and you've posted it as a hyperlink.
Also, a changing room in Marks and Spencer isn't an association. Nobody is asking to join anything. I want to try a dress on and go home.
Stevie: Applied without qualification it gets you the golf club that won't have Jews, the boarding house with the sign in the window, the lunch counter that serves ...
Public services are rather different from private ones, ones explicitly for narrow segments of the population. For example, businesses selling food might reasonably be obliged to provide that service to all members of the public. And public services explicitly for members of particular categories -- kids clothing, school-year starting soon -- might reasonably decline to try fitting older people -- or, maybe, some hulking pedophile -- into their wares.
And there are things like the recent quite risible Giggle vs Tickle case. But that case turns much of the judiciary -- at least the Australian one although many American, British, and Canadian ones are no better -- into a bunch of ignorant clowns -- where the proprietor-ess, one Sall Grover, of a media application, the aforementioned "Giggle For Girls [for goofy gals?]" was obliged to pay some "10,000 plus costs" because Grover had -- quite reasonably, at least in my book -- declined to let "Miss" "Roxanne" -- Tess -- Tickle use her media platform and Internet application.
The Guardian: Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle wins discrimination case after being banned from women-only app
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/23/roxanne-tickle-v-giggle-for-girls-transgender-woman-wins-discrimination-case-against-women-female-only-app-ntwnfb
That "freedom of association" is clearly not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it clearly has many solid examples of justified application.
Your last line is mine. Freedom of association is clearly not a get-out-of-jail-free card. That was the whole of my objection, so we agree, and it leaves the principle doing none of the work. What's doing the work is the qualification, and the qualification is the thing I asked you to show me.
The public and private distinction is the right shape for it, mind, and I'd take it seriously. It just doesn't go where you need it to go. The case actually in dispute is a lavatory in Boots and a changing room in Marks and Spencer, both of them retail premises open to anybody with a bus fare. On your own taxonomy those are the lunch counter, not the golf club.
The children's clothing shop isn't the example you want either. It doesn't refuse to serve adults, and it would go under in a fortnight if it did, since adults are the ones holding the money. What it declines to do is fit a grown woman into a garment cut for a six year old, which is a fact about the stock rather than a rule about the door. Nobody is stopped on the way in and asked to account for themselves. That is exactly the difference I keep pointing at, and your example sits on my side of it.
The hulking paedophile I'll mention once. Take it out of the sentence and the sentence is unchanged. It carries no weight, it establishes nothing, and it is sitting in a paragraph addressed to me. You argue better than that when you bother.
Now Giggle, because you've chosen the one case that has moved a long way since your link.
The Guardian piece is August 2024 and the ten thousand is the first instance figure. In May of this year the Full Federal Court dismissed Grover's appeal, allowed Tickle's cross appeal, reclassified the conduct as two acts of direct rather than indirect discrimination, and doubled the damages to twenty thousand. Last Thursday the High Court refused special leave, with costs. That is three benches.
So your solid example of justified application is a case in which every court that has looked at it has held that the application was not justified. That isn't an example. It's a grievance, and you're entitled to it, but it cannot be your evidence and your objection at the same time.
And Giggle is a private application with one stated purpose. Grant me nothing. Grant that every judge involved was a clown. It still doesn't reach a chemist's on a Friday afternoon. You have answered the easiest case in the argument by reaching for the hardest one you could find.
Which leaves your own distinction, and I'd like you to finish it, because it's the best thing either of us has put on this page. Food for everybody. Children's clothes cut for children. Fine. Now place the lavatory in Boots. What is it for, such that I defeat the purpose of it by using it and washing my hands?
If I may stick my nose in here, the trouble is that the way the law works means that letting you try a dress in in an M&S changing room (something I personally would have no problem with) also allows men with functioning penises into rape crisis centres. Having been raped, I can attest that this would have driven me mad.
Yes, men are raped too, which is horrible. Yes, of course, not all men are rapists. But this is the basis of women's sex-based rights, and I believe it outweighs your desire to try on a dress.
And I say this as someone who has always had gender-nonconforming friends. I wish you well in your life, and hope that you will be happy.
Thank you for writing that, and I'm sorry for what's sitting behind it. I'm not going to sit here and tell you a rape crisis centre and a changing room in M&S are the same room, because they plainly aren't.
The premise doing the work in your comment is that they come as a set. One rule for every door, so the hardest case settles the easiest one. If that's right then you've won and there's nothing much left to say.
But nothing else works that way. We don't run one rule for a nightclub and a doctor's surgery, or for a prison and a swimming pool. Different places have different facts in them and get different answers, and a refuge working out who it can safely take in is doing exactly that, and has been doing it for a very long time, without anybody first having to settle what happens in Marks and Spencer.
What I'd resist is the direction of travel. The argument nearly always starts at the hardest door, because that's where it's strongest, and then walks the result back down the corridor to the lipstick counter. That's the move. It's also why the changing room never actually gets discussed on its own terms.
And thank you for the last line. It's rarer than it ought to be.
But the trouble is that once the sex discrimination laws apply, different places may NOT work out who they can safely take in. If it is decreed that a whole man who declares himself a woman is jn.law a woman, he cannot then be excluded from any women's space, be it M&S changing rooms or a rape crisis centre. Choice is deliberately removed.
Seems you're still looking to be treated as something you aren't. And I don't think you have any right at all to that.
Glad you've weighed-in, some good points, many of which I agree with.
The Big Problem, as you suggest, is of people "sailing under false flags", the potential for fraud and a bait and switch; surprise, surprise, surprise. Ha, ha, and all that.
But kind of reminds me of a bit of Biblical lore -- Peter ... -- that had it that it is "an abomination unto the Lord that" people wear the clothes typical of the other sex. Or words to that effect:
Deuteronomy 22:5; King James Version:
5 The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2022%3A5&version=KJV
Whether such "cross-dressing" is an "abomination" or not, there are practical matters in regulating who has access to which services and opportunities, to equitable treatment in a wide variety of situations.
An app with a serious purpose but also you have a great sense of humour. Thank you :)
Thank you. This is an honest tool also. If you try a question something like this below, where you actually put your case forward, it will give you a totally fair hearing and a green pass. It's not looking for wrong arguments. It's looking for bad arguments, bullshit arguments. It is a bullshit detector.
"I think some settings, such as prisons or high-dependency care environments, raise real safeguarding questions. I would want individual risk assessment, clear evidence, and practical safeguards rather than either blanket inclusion or blanket exclusion."
Fun to play with - tried using a TERF argument, then expanded on it but couldn't get a passing grade. Probably because any argument they use is pure BS and I just don't care enough to go to ugly parts of the web to find fake 'proof' that they use, if they ever do use proof - I've yet to see anything beyond that idiotic web site that says getting a participation trophy is 'stealing' from cis women.
That's roughly what I'd hoped. It isn't grading you on whether it agrees with you, it's grading whether the answer actually addresses the question that was asked. Which turns out to be quite a hard test to pass if you're arguing in bad faith, and an easy one if you aren't.
Funny how you can't find any proof and in the same breath say you've never bothered looking for any... anyway, the point is, most women will never agree that men are women and there is the crux. You can argue and build digital toys and litigate and cancel people to your hearts content but you just cannot control what people think, ever. And if scaring people into using compelled speech us what passes for acceptance for you, well thats not genuine acceptance really is it? So, you can't win that way either. And that's why you need the kids on board isn't it? Take advantage of their innocence and credulity, get them while they're young and gullible. And we women, the real ones, we see you for who you are, which explains the hate. Because we are right. And you know it. Just call yourselves gender non-conforming men, and we'll leave you alone. But also, stay away from or kids and our spaces.
Taking the argument first, because there is one in there.
You're quite right that you cannot legislate a belief, and I've never wanted to. I have never once asked you to think I'm a woman. I'd be wasting both our afternoons. What I want is duller than that. Buy a lipstick, use a toilet, hold a passport, be left alone. None of it requires your agreement, which is just as well, because I'm not going to get it.
Then there's the head count, which cuts the other way from the way you've swung it. What people currently believe is a fact about opinion and no fact at all about what anybody is owed. Public feeling is the very last place I'd go looking for the answer to a question like this, and you wouldn't accept it as a method either the moment it stopped going your way.
And then there's the last bit, which isn't an argument and you know it isn't. It's the oldest line in the drawer, pointed at whichever group is currently inconvenient, and it does the same job every time. It ends the conversation without anybody having to win it. I'm not going to perform being wounded by it. I'm simply not going to treat it as a premise.
And your proof of that? Oh yeah, there is none. I'm Canadian so I care about the views here - https://angusreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2023.09.19_Gender_Trans_issues.pdf shows on page 6 that a slim majority of young women (18-34) support the statement that anyone who wishes to identify as a woman is in fact a woman. In fact, if you check 35% of all respondents agree with that, more than feel your TERF views are right. In no age/gender group is your view the majority view. NONE. In fact the only groups that feels more your way than mine is cis men. Funny - you agree with men while women are on my and Stevie's side. Maybe you are a secretly a man posing under a woman's alias in order to get noticed?
So you're full of it. The hate has grown lately thanks to mega rich scum like Musk (due to his daughter being trans) and JKR (who I suspect is a self hating closeted trans man due to assorted factors). Sadly we don't have any mega billionaires on our side (often to become that rich you need to be a bit of a scumbag anyways). Enjoy living in hate, while us trans women live a happy life laughing at sad little people like you.
That's rather more homework than I've ever put into one of these threads myself, and it's appreciated. I leave the polling fights to people who enjoy them more than I do, but it's good to know the numbers are behind us anyway.
You're a 60 year old man who started acting out your male fantasy idea of women since a couple of months ago. You have literally nothing of value to say on women's rights.
You might have more credibility if your bio said that you "Came out as a transwoman, as a male transvestite in 2026"
You and old Stevie might consider this old post from Michelle Goldberg where she interviewed transwoman "Helen Highwater" who called your and Stevie's mantra and article of faith -- i.e., “trans women are women” -- a "vicious lie". It's been quite some time since a bigger Big Lie, and more batshit crazy idea has come down the pike:
QUOTE; Slate; Michelle Goldberg: The Trans Women Who Say That Trans Women Aren’t Women; Meet the apostates of the trans rights movement. Dec 09, 2015
Yet [he, Highwater] has come to reject the idea that [he] is truly female or that [he] ever will be. Though “trans women are women” has become a trans rights rallying cry, Highwater writes, it primes trans women for failure, disappointment, and cognitive dissonance. [He] calls it a “vicious lie.” .... UNQUOTE
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/12/gender-critical-trans-women-the-apostates-of-the-trans-rights-movement.html
Goldberg had linked to a blog post by Highwater, though it had been deleted, probably by the "Tranish Inquisition". But I did run across an archive of it which is rather illuminating reading:
Tumblr: http://transavant.tumblr.com/post/132016557177/trans-women-are-women-is-a-lie-that-is-as (dead link);
Archive: https://archive.ph/2VNmF
Of particular note is his, "Helen's", subtitle, particularly his "gender non-conforming male" and "transwoman" therein:
HH: Gender Non Conforming Male or Transwoman if you prefer (no space please). Biological male, proud father, hopeless optimist, naive idealist.
An argument from testimony, and one you would not accept for a second in the other direction.
One trans woman says the phrase is a vicious lie. Granted, she said it. Now find me a gender critical woman who changed her mind and watch how quickly a single defector stops settling anything. Highwater is authoritative about Highwater. That is the entire extent of it, and you would say exactly the same to me if I tried it on you.
It is also a claim about a slogan rather than a policy, and you have picked the one part of this I would hand you for nothing. I am not especially wedded to trans women are women as a sentence. I have written in print that in one narrow biological sense the opposite is true, and that I don't need metaphysical perfection from the universe before I am allowed to exist with dignity.
So you have demolished the bit I was never defending, and the question I actually put remains standing and unanswered.
Thank you for this. It is, in its way, a perfect specimen.
The article argues that anti-trans replies often avoid the actual question by substituting a more emotionally convenient one. The tool was then built to test precisely that habit: does the reply answer the claim on the table, or does it run sideways into a slogan, a vibe, or a proxy grievance?
And here you are, kindly demonstrating the mechanism in the wild.
The question was not: “Do you enjoy the title?”
Nor was it: “Do you personally approve of my career?”
Nor even: “Can you assemble a mood board of things you associate with men?”
The question was whether the argument actually answers the policy point being made.
Instead, you have offered:
1. the title sounds naughty to you, therefore male;
2. programming is associated with men, therefore male;
3. disagreement makes conversation uncivil, therefore male;
4. my website has checklists, therefore male.
This is not an argument. It is a rummage through a handbag of stereotypes.
The programming point is especially charming. We appear to have arrived at a feminism in which women must be encouraged into STEM, unless a trans woman is already there, in which case technical competence becomes suspiciously unfeminine. One does admire the flexibility. It must be tiring to keep moving the principle around like that.
As for “very male”, this is not analysis. It is a decorative stamp applied after the fact. You could have written the same conclusion after any premise whatsoever:
“She codes.” Very male.
“She argues.” Very male.
“She builds a website.” Very male.
“She replies.” Very male.
“She breathes through the nose rather than the gills.” Very male.
At some point, the conclusion is no longer being reasoned towards. It is merely being protected from contact with evidence.
Which, rather neatly, is what the essay was about.
So thank you. Truly. I could not have asked for a cleaner demonstration. The machine was built to identify the moment when an answer stops addressing the question and starts laundering discomfort through a more respectable-looking complaint.
You have not refuted the tool.
You have submitted yourself to it.
It's so very typical of these men isn't it. I can see why his wife left him, he's insufferable.
Oh my, that was a great parody of a TERF. Oh wait, you were serious???? Even funnier. Computer programming for years was dominated by women, until men decided it was valuable. So basically calling it a sign of being male is pure misogyny. Weird to say writing out ones viewpoint is male, given YOU wrote out a response. Sounds like you are a guy hiding behind a female name online based on your criteria. Sigh. Arguing with a person like you is a waste of time, as I doubt you have listened to anyone in an effort to learn since elementary school.