Labour discussing plans to include trans women on women only shortlists

I think discussing the "number of genders/sexes" is a largely unproductive question. I think it's much more helpful to think of it as a continuum with two ends. The vast majority of people are close enough to one end or the other to be able to confidently say which side of the spectrum they are on, but there are a handful around the middle who don't know or are at some level unsure.

And does that go away for the parts of the article that contradict your argument?

For instance, the article affirms the possibility of "social and legal transition to the desired gender" and even "transition to the opposite sex". Yet presumably, you deny that these transitions are "real"?

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But the distinction is absolutely vital. Gender is not protected. Sex is. By erasing sex and creating 'gender identity", they are able to erase sex protected rights.

Women cannot talk about menstruation anymore because "not all women menstruate". It is offending to trans women to say "women" when talking about menstruation. Further up I linked to the Oxford (or cam, i dont remember now) women's officer. She calls them "our menstruating students". Her first heading is "trans rights". She isn't LGBT.

If sex is no longer protected, then women's sports will become a sausage fest of failed male athletes who just want to win but can't in men's.

And I could go on. Point is, sex matters.

Fully agree.

But should that mean that everyone gets to self ID (i.e. lie to be sent to a woman's prison instead of staying in a men's one, live out a fetish, etc.)? Should it mean that those in the middle that present physically as male, but feel women should compete against women in sports?

Read the thread and tell me this isn't only lunacy, it's highly nefarious and incredibly damaging to actual women. And yes, actual. Because a woman is a female human.

Going to group this together under one post for the sake of tidiness.



Gender identity is not a protected characteristic, true, but gender reassignment is.

Secondly, sports. Ultimately, I think the eventual solution for sports (or at least athletics and individual events) will be some sort of boxing/weightlifting-style class system, based on various measurable physiological factors, replacing division by sex or gender. Ideally, this would also solve the issue of intersex athletes, and potentially provide a more straighforward pathway for paralympic athletes wanting to compete in mainstream events. In the meantime, I think setting an upper limited of permitted hormone levels is a decent compromise. If you think the current limits are too high, then fair enough, I wouldn't particularly have an issue with them being lowered.

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." - Simone de Beauvoir

(I'm assuming you mean XX?)

This is one of the most blatant cases of moving the goalposts I've ever seen. You've literally just claimed "they are a man if they have a penis", and now you're claiming it's actually about chromosomes instead? So which is it?

Also, it's long been recognised that using chromosomes to judge sex or gender is problematic. Even outside of trans issues, there are women who are XY or single-X, men who are XXY or XYY, and several other rarer conditions. This is a large part of the reason why athletics stopped sex verification by chromosome testing in 1996 - there were simply too many exceptions.

Let's get really radical, instead of picking people because of the colour of their skin or what they keep between their legs, we pick the best candidate for the job. It's called equality of opportunity and it's the policy of people who live in the real world.

Wait, so you mean to tell me women and minorities DONT deserve special treatment and that civil rights have come a long way since the 1920s to the point where we're all equal? HOW ABSURD!

You mean to tell me that fighting discrimination with discrimination is abohreent and wrong? RIDICULOUS.

Next you'll be telling me that the wage gap is not solely down to sexism, but more logical factors such as women's life choices! Get out of here!

Because life choices are made in a vacuum?

Oh and only young fan kiddies think Friedman was right. I used to as well, before I realized what nonsense he thought would never work in reality.

What inherently do you disagree with him on?

Also just because I have a picture of him in no way means I agree with everything he says. I just admire the guy. Agree or disagree with the man, you can't have anything but respect for someone like him.

Also TIL: Many world leaders were young fan kiddies

I was so into him I started reading some of his books. None of it is realistic. In reality, markets fail left, right, and center.

Well, I've only started touching the surface of Milton's work, but he's certainly never claimed markets don't fail.

He's a Nobel prize winning economist for god's sake...nobody gets to that level without having a certain degree of realism to themselves. He has certainly acknowledged that market failures occur, but he also states (and don't quote me on this) that these failures often mend themselves, and that if the government intervenes, these failures are exaccerbated.

A good example would be the 1920s American market crashes. The government of the time decided to not intervene and it quickly restored itself. However, in 1929, the government took a more interventionist stance, and and I don't need to tell you how disasterous THAT was.

To reduce both events to a simple yes/no of government intervention is daftly simplistic.

Never said he isn't insanely clever, or didn't do anything for economics. Just that by the time I was half way through his book I just couldn't go on any more.

So what? Gender means nothing. Women have sex protected rights, not gender.

Identity politics is highly dangerous. Self ID is the height of self indulgence and narcissism. Consider say statistics based on sex, research based on sex. If people just self ID left and right, all of that is distorted.

But how? Are you going to measure T levels for everyone? Are you going to have 10, 100m finals at the Olympics? Sorry but that is never going to be feasible. We are a dimorphic reproductive species. There is nothing wrong with using that as a basis. If there is a small subgroup of people that want to move away from that, let them play for themsleves.

Fair enough but 2 points: 1. TRAs always cry about how supposedly everyone disagreeing with them is "literally being violent" and 2. Yet they dish it out far more. That was the point.

Not sure a single quote by a single, infallible person is anything but a soundbite.

Apologies for delayed reply, I've had a busy week.



Incorrect, if you actually check guidelines on what is meant by "gender reassignment" in the context of discrimination, it's relatively clear that it applies to trans people regardless of surgical operations. Discrimination against someone for being trans is just as illegal as discrimination against someone for their sex.



Why? Will research specifically on cis men and women suddenly stop if self-ID becomes law?



What is that basis, exactly? If it's due to the average man's physical advantages, then why stop there rather than dividing sports based on other physiological differences as well? You're repeating many of the same arguments misogynists employ to argue that there shouldn't be separate women's events at all.



And my point was that it's very difficult to assess a Gish Gallop by their nature, and frankly I don't really see how what you're now claiming your point was connects to the bulk of the tweet-thread (much of which involves either cases where the trans status of the person involved is incidental, or where the author attacks trans people for reasons unconnected to them being trans).



I did consider typing out a point along the same lines myself, but felt the famous De Beauvoir quote put it across more succinctly. Namely that going back to the start of the second-wave movements, feminism was at its core an anti-essentialist movement, that rejected the idea than "woman" and "man" were inherent categories rather than constructed ones. Just as anti-racist movements have done with "black" and "white", and so on.

Say bathrooms or sports are sex segregated not gender.

Crime statistics for one. It's been shown that both male and female trans retain male and female crime rates. If all of a sudden, especially male sex offenders, pretend to be women, and we record these crimes as committed by women, that is a huge distortion.

This is pure nonsense. You're simply denying biological reality, that men and women are two separate classes, with significantly different physiology. It's frankly an argument I hear every trans activists make when trying to justify how men should compete against women. It's dishonest and sickening. Do you also want to categorize events by height like some of these morons? Amazing, Ronaldo and Messi would never play against each other because they'd be in different height categories. You want 10 different 100m finals based on height and weight? Yea amazing.

Except you won't find many second wave

/ radfems today who will argue that patriarchy isn't based on sex.

Girls in the third world aren't aborted or abandoned because of gender, but because of sex.

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Sometimes they are and sometimes they're not. In the UK specifically, there's no codified law specifying who the service providers of segregated toilets are obliged to let or prevent using them - in theory it's up to the providers. However, guidelines on good practice generally indicate that trans people should be allowed to use the toilet of the gender they present as.

Accepting this purely for the sake of argument (and of course, any such argument would require the reverse context of trans women being victims of crime at a significantly higher rate than cis men), it wouldn't be a "huge distortion" at all. For a start, we're talking <1% of the population - they're unlikely to even have a statistically significant effect in most general data, never mind a "huge distortion".

But more significantly though, it's no more a "distortion" than including any minority subgroup within a wider study would be just because that subgroup happens to have statistically significant differences. It's merely a statistical factor that those conducting the study might then opt to control for if relevant.

For example, if a study of experiences of antisemitism found that converts to Judaism experienced a statistically significant lower degree of antisemitism than Jews on average, that would not make it a "distortion" to include the former in the study under the designation of "Jews", rather than "non-Jews". It would just make it another factor to be controlled for.

Ironic that the longest paragraph in your post is also the one with the least substance of argument, and instead just lots of assertations and calling people "sickening" and "morons".....

Not sure what relevance this has since I'm pretty sure I've not used the word TERF in this entire thread. But while we're here, Gish Gallop again.

You won't find many second wavers today full stop because the second wave is over, most consider it to have finished around the 1980s.

That being one of several reasons why many who identified as "radfems" were effectively left behind by the third-wavers.



No, if it's due to the social/cultural construction of the role of women in their societies, that's gender.