I still think that you’re conflating the acknowledgment of gender with how an organisation structures itself. Acknowledging transwomen as women doesn’t necessitate all transwomen being able to participate at an elite level. Acknowledging transwomen as women doesn’t necessitate putting all tanswomen prisoners in a womens prison unsegregated.

No it’s not. These guys aren’t even pretending to be pragmatic, they flat out want to exclude transwomen from being considered as women.

Ah whoops - link

Well, I'll admit that their published Principles read kinda dogmatic, but fuck it's a bunch of Rape Crisis counsellors, Women's Refuge volunteers, abortion rights activists, and violence-against-women protestors... I figure they've seen some shit.

For clarity, what purpose do the bits I bolded serve?

^ that some transwomen might retain too much of an advantage to participate in the top womens only grade, depending on the sport.

Well, by introducing advantage into it you're acknowledging a separate consideration beyond inclusiveness and safety: fairness. If fairness is a consideration it doesn't matter what the grade is. It's just as unfair to require a teenage girl to compete against a natal male in a school competition where maleness confers an advantage as it is to require an experienced elite-level woman to do so at the Olympic Games.

At the school age level I would agree but I think when it comes to adults other factors come into play such as length of therapy, age, genetics and what particular sport they're competing in. For example I doubt a medium built 30 year old long distance swimming transwoman receiving therapy from 12 years of age would be out of the normal variation of ability of ciswoman.

Straw man; maleness does not confer an advantage in long distance swimming competition.

Same argument, but without referring to sport.... go!

Yes, the level of residual advantage is dependent on the sport, among other factors.

Exactly. Whatever issues need to be sorted out in sports competition is no reason not to acknowledge transwoman as woman.

Preventing androgynisation by administering puberty blockers does not turn a boy into a girl. It prevents a boy from becoming a man. HRT can give that boy more of the outward physical characteristics we associate with femininity. However a boy who has not experienced puberty will not, for example, grow a larger pelvis or a more-curved spine. Those female characteristics reflect the fact that women's bodies are engineered to grow babies. Preventing a male child from becoming a man does not give that child a female body. The geometry of a female body is a physical disadvantage in many athletic events regardless of puberty (or, the shape of a male one is if the competition is not dying during pregnancy)

For males who have passed through the one-way door of puberty, hormone therapy (for example, reducing testosterone) reduces the male athletic advantage by about 6%. An elite male competitor post-puberty will have a 15% advantage in speed over an elite female, a 40% advantage in upperbody strength, a 160% advantage in punching power. Male blood carries 11% more oxygen than female blood and male hearts pump 30% more of it. Take 6 off any of those numbers and the contest is still unfair.

If we as a society value fairness in sport, there must be competitions of those sports in which maleness confers an advantage in which females are not forced to compete against natal males. Sport is an example of a human activity in which "female" should be a protected category. My understanding is that it's for reasons such as this that the Speak Up For Women group is concerned at the prospect of a law change that would give "self-id as gender woman" the same legal status as "female".

That's short term studies. Which yes does show that the olympic standard of 12 months is too short. Although while more longer term studies are needed current evidence does suggest that the longer the treatment the greater the effect on the suppression of athletic performance.

Even if this was true, denying transwoman woman status altogether is not a necessary consequence.

It was a rhetorical question, because it IS true. It just is.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that the Speak Up For Women group seem to be arguing that there should be situations in which self-id as "gender woman" does not confer membership in the protected class "female". Which seems perfectly sensible.

Seriously, treat any statement from this group as a disingenuous argument intended to reinforce bias against transsexual women. I suppose one could use the "stopped clock" argument, but it's disappointing and disturbing that you're swallowing their BS.

Yeah, but their manifesto seems perfectly sensible to me. There's nothing in it that should be regarded as controversial in a sane discussion, with the exception of the first part of #1, which (as previously articulated) I think isn't a black-or-white matter.


https://speakupforwomen.nz/about-us/our-principles/

1: Yeah, to me that's exclusionary bullshit
2 through 6: no issues
7: First part is more a statement than a principle. Suggests they're bisexual exclusionary - though I'll credit that might be me reading things into it.
8: This isn't a principle at all, just a definition that doesn't agree with a lot of the science in the space.

2+2 = 5, Winston.

You... don't think that "lesbians are exclusively same-sex attracted females"?

8. ‘Sex’ refers to the biological characteristics that distinguish males from females. Sex is immutable. ‘Gender’ refers to the stereotyped roles, behaviours and attributes that society at a given time considers appropriate for males and females.

Nah dude that's literally a statement of scientific fact.

It's like trying to work out the rules of the game after everyone has stopped playing.

I mean, yeah, I get some people are still up to play. But there's no ref, the scoreboard is turned off...

FOR GOD'S SAKE WILL YOU GIVE UP THIS SPORT FIXATION

I don't get the reference?

I obviously miscommunicated here. Try two: 1) It's not a principle 2) Why no consideration of bisexual women if you're specifically addressing lesbian women?


Aside from my primary point being that is not a principle...

So what biological characteristics are you using to determine sex? What is someone with a penis and breasts? Or a vagina but a flat chest without mammary glands? Yes I know you're a Gamete superiority determinist, but if someone looks female I'm going to assume they are female unless they communicate otherwise, and vice-versa.

Also the gender statement? Oh come off it - that's opinion, not scientific fact.

It's a principle if they say it's a principle, doofus. It's a belief the founders share and one on which they've founded the group. You know. A "founding principle".

And they're not addressing lesbian women. This is just a guess but I presume that at least some of them are lesbian women, and they are addressing the world. They are saying that lesbians are exclusively same-sex attracted females. That is, they are females (and not males) who are attracted to other females (not to males). Doesn't seem incoherent or philosophically contentious to me.
I think you actually answer this yourse--
I don't know because that's not en--
Like I said I don't kn--

Exactly. The fundamental division of our sexually dimorphic species is that some produce big resource-rich sex cells and some produce small mobile sex cells. The scientific terms for those groups are "female" and "male".

I don't think a narrow description of sex even matters. Sex describes male & female but in describing man & woman a person's gender is also a consideration i.e. you can have a cisgender man and a transgender man.

"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense."


Basically, the "obvious" has become twisted and society is demanding that we stop seeing the obvious and go along with collective nonsense, for the good of society/"The Party".

It matters everywhere that sex matters. Which is lots of places. One sex makes all the babies. One sex commits more crime. One sex earns less money. One sex dies of COVID at a greater rate. One sex dies of ovarian cancer. One sex is most of the deaths from suicide.

And yes there are some places where it doesn’t, or shouldn't, matter. But pretending it matters nowhere, and demanding that everyone else pretend that too, is behaviour reminiscent of a religious cult. or an Orwell novel.

That's not what I said. I said however you choose to measure sex is irrelevant because sex isn't the only consideration in saying who gets to call themselves a woman.

My bad, I thought that when you said "I don't think a narrow description of sex even matters" you meant everywhere.

Then I think we're in agreement. I also do not think sex is the only consideration in saying who gets to call themselves a woman (or man). Like I said, if someone lives as a member of a particular gender and fills the social roles of a particular gender then I wouldn't even blink at considering that person to be that gender.

But there are some situations in which what you consider yourself to be is irrelevant to what you biologically are. For example, if a person takes a blood or urine test and that test reveals elevated levels of human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG) that could mean one of two things:

1. if female, pregnancy
2. if male, testicular cancer

When a nurse holds up a test indicating elevated levels of HCG and asks whether you're male or female, to respond "there's no such thing as sex, I identify as..." is fucking stupid. And for your self-identification to be the only information available because your self-ID today retroactively overwrote your life's birth and health records is also fucking stupid.

Many scenarios exist where medical and other care workers need to understand something specific about you, with the necessary techniques to identify what they need to know. Sometimes they'll literally stab you to find out, if that's what's required.

Given the kind of questions that sometimes need to be asked, the question "and what kind of genitals do you have" isn't exactly shocking.

Being expected to constantly communicate what's in your pants is more disturbing IMO.

Imagine a problem that affects the sexes differently but which is only visible long after the fact, like an environmental contamination or a disease outbreak or a combo of things. Maybe women who lived near a chemical plant all dropped dead of Alzheimers at age 50. Maybe men who received a certain medication and also caught chicken pox all went sterile. Maybe it only shows up in number crunching after the fact. Maybe it happened so long ago that there's no-one around to ask any more. If self-ID overwrites birth records, those problems are invisible.

We're largely ignoring warnings about climate change. How countries have responded to the pandemic has been mostly politically driven.

And yet you're saying we have to go around advertising what's in our pants because of some imagined maybe possible harm that might perhaps happen at some unknown point?

um what

My read was you were offering a hypothetical reason why we have to stick with our traditional gender designations: an imagined scenario where harm might occur if we don't.

Which doesn't seem coherent with our relative indifference to harm in our communities.

Not at all. I offered a hypothetical in which retaining records of people's biological sex is useful to the community and does them no harm. I said nothing about sticking with traditional gender designations.

Under the proposed "Self-ID" change to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act, a person would be able to have the sex on his or her birth certificate retroactively changed to read how he or she identifies at that moment. That strikes me as a stupid idea.

Okay, I wasn't completely on track with the discussion.

Another hypothetical is as we abandon this rough external measure and develop more fine tuned models, we discover that our focus on the male/female split has been missing subtle features that have been obscured by this particular lens.

We can come up with a new way to gather what's relevant that isn't tied to old ideas.

Most likely multiple models will exist concurrently.

I feel sorry for future genealogists.

Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony director Kentaro Kobayashi fired less than 48hours before ceremony for (checks notes) referring to the Holocaust in a joke in 1998.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-...ents/100314692

Yes we fucking do.

That new anti hate legislation is gonna be the perfect bit of spice to our new Orwellian world.

Concerns about free speech are pure misdirection. We face nothing like those who really fought for free speech endured. The diluting of our academic institutions is the real work of any such "Orwellian" agenda.

Misdirected concerns of free speech? Go on then...

I feel sorry for future gynecologists.

Maybe it's just me but nothing that's happened in this new woke world (or proposed legislation) has affected my speech or actions.