Sex Discrimination/Sex Segregation in Public Accommodations

 I remember reading in the mid-twenty-teens on Jezebel about a YMCA or other community center in the twin cities that had started a designated women-only swimming times for the pool in order to accommodate Muslim women who otherwise wouldn't be able to swim.

This form of discrimination was good as it was only a few hours a week, and made it possible for the sizeable Muslim women population of the area to use the pool, which they otherwise wouldn't be able to.  Only MRAs objected.  I remember seeing something similar more recently for public pools in Brooklyn with large orthodox populations.  

So why when the male people in question identify as women is this different?

NYT Transgender Coverage

First there was the coverage of various issues, mainly related to pediatric medical transition, by people like Katie JM Baker, Azeen Ghorayshi, Emily Bazelon, and Megan Twohey and Christina Jewett (both of Me Too fame), then there was also the transman clinician (professor?) who wrote about transitioners.  

Notably, since their articles came out, Katie JM Baker (who wrote a previous article a few years ago about TERFs and Mumsnet in Britain) and the trans clinician looking into detransitioners deleted their twitter accounts.  Alejandra Caraballo and friends took credit that it must have been due to their bullying.

But now that the GLAAD letter and the letter from the contributors was published, and that the NYT has responded, the union is getting involved.  The allegation is that coverage and editorial choices are a matter of working conditions, creating unsafe working conditions for "LGBTQ" employees.

So another case of attempting to use the language of discrimination on the basis of participants to enforce a new rule of discrimination on the basis of participation type.  

Manufacturing Consent and Participation in Narrative Legitimation: Gas Stoves

In the recent discourse over gas stoves, people who have never mentioned the issue before at all were speaking as if it was obvious that they need to be regulated away, and opposition to this can only be the result of know-nothingism. 

Is Anne Fausto-Sterling coming around to reject the concept of gender identity?

Is she?

Gender Identity Conflicts

 Just another illustration of how moving from sex to gender identity in policy disadvantages though disadvantages by sex, i.e. females. 

Lia Thomas' teammates at UPenn were told to seek counseling services if they had a problem with Thomas' dominance in the pool.

Similar to how UK school guidance told teachers to move the complaining female child if she had a problem competing or changing with males.  

Non-voters' Politics?

Brian Leiter flags some research on the politics of non-voters:

• Non-voters have less faith in the electoral system than voters. Non-voters say they don’t vote for many reasons, including not liking the candidates and feeling their vote doesn’t matter. Compared with voters, they have less faith in the electoral system, don’t feel they have enough information, and are less likely to think increased participation in elections is good for the country. They are more likely to think “the system is rigged.” 

• Splitting the vote in 2020. If non-voters all turned out in 2020, non-voter candidate preferences show they would add nearly equal share to Democratic and Republican candidates (33 percent versus 30 percent, respectively), while 18 percent said they would vote for a third party.

• Evenly divided on Trump. They are more evenly divided on current political issues and President Trump than previously thought. Fifty-one percent have a negative opinion of Trump, versus 40 percent positive. While non-voters skew center-left on some key issues like health care, they are slightly more conservative than active voters on immigration and abortion.

• Non-voters are less engaged with news and information. They consume less news, are more likely to accidentally “bump into” news rather than seeking it out actively, and more likely to say they don’t feel informed enough to decide who to vote for.

• Eligible Gen Z voters say they are less interested in politics and 2020 election than non-voters. Americans aged 18 to 24 are less interested in politics and less informed. They are the age cohort least likely to say they will vote in 2020, and 38 percent say they don’t have enough information to decide who to vote for.

I wonder how this research compares with the research underlying Kendi's points that he makes on "the other swing voters" here, since his argument seems to require non-voters to skew left significantly.  

Academic Values

 Via this piece in the Chronicle, Nell Irvin Painter signed onto the anti-academic freedom Princeton letter.

I'm reminded also of what she said about the 1619 Project kerfuffle: 

Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton who was asked to sign the letter, had objected to the 1619 Project’s portrayal of the arrival of African laborers in 1619 as slaves. The 1619 Project was not history “as I would write it,” Painter told me. But she still declined to sign the Wilentz letter.

“I felt that if I signed on to that, I would be signing on to the white guy's attack of something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way. So I support the 1619 Project as kind of a cultural event,” Painter said. “For Sean and his colleagues, true history is how they would write it. And I feel like he was asking me to choose sides, and my side is 1619's side, not his side, in a world in which there are only those two sides.”

This was a recurrent theme among historians I spoke with who had seen the letter but declined to sign it. While they may have agreed with some of the factual objections in the letter or had other reservations of their own, several told me they thought the letter was an unnecessary escalation.

“The tone to me rather suggested a deep-seated concern about the project. And by that I mean the version of history the project offered. The deep-seated concern is that placing the enslavement of black people and white supremacy at the forefront of a project somehow diminishes American history,” Thavolia Glymph, a history professor at Duke who was asked to sign the letter, told me. “Maybe some of their factual criticisms are correct. But they've set a tone that makes it hard to deal with that.”

“I don't think they think they're trying to discredit the project,” Painter said. “They think they're trying to fix the project, the way that only they know how.”

Responsible Academics and Diversity

 My friend told me about the Critical Approaches to Diversity section on her syllabus, and wondered if--since I like the professor--if it would be Critical in a heterodox way?

I said that no, it is likely to be the orthodoxy, but that doesn't mean he's not a good professor or academic.

In fact, he is a good, responsible academic because he is going with the orthodoxy, and he's not an expert on this particular area.  So he is deferring to the experts, and that's good.

What went wrong in this case is that the expertise is illegitimate due to institutional capture because the usual epistemic forces that govern scholarship do not function normally on these issues.  

"Progressive" Journalistic Standards

The particulars of this story are unremarkable, but it's just another banal example of how progressive orthodoxy and its accompanying standard practices are rife for abuse by bad actors.  

This WaPo piece on the Queer Appalachia account includes these quotes illustrating the progressive tendency to not ask for evidence and take things on trust when it comes to marginalized people and good causes, as asking for and supply evidence is itself an injury:

"As the account picked up followers — 276,000 and counting — it received coverage from NBC News, Slate and USA Today, among many others....

"In a 2018 Bitch Magazine article, author Kristina Gaddy described QA as a collective of 15 people, a number that Gaddy attributes to Mamone....

"I spoke to nine people who donated material for the Electric Dirt zine, five journalists who have covered Queer Appalachia, and nine representatives of small nonprofits who received or were supposed to receive money from QA. They all said they’d never communicated with anyone at QA except Mamone....

"Journalists, perhaps eager to support what they perceive as a worthy cause, have written stories built only on interviews with Mamone...

"The rhetoric Mamone and Queer Appalachia use make them somewhat criticism-proof. “They have a lot of clout, and everyone is so afraid of backlash, being accused of not being supportive,” says Kayleigh Phillips. “I did feel a level of compassion [for Mamone],” she says of their time working closely together. “But ... they’re preying on the people that they’re supposed to be helping.”...

"“They presented themselves as a leftist and an anarchist,” says Leo. “But at the end of the day, it’s capitalism. And it’s been exploitation of all these people who really believe [in] and maybe have projected what they’ve wanted onto this project.”"

Same as with Erdley's Rolling Stone UVA sexual assault story, when she didn't try to corroborate certain facts, even when the public assumed she had--including her supportive audience, i.e. Anna Merlan etc.

ACLU on Transgender Athletes

 Interestingly, this ACLU document (https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbt-rights/four-myths-about-trans-athletes-debunked/) undermines the ACLU's position in their case for the CT transgender sprinters, since the CT policy does not require hormone therapy, in that the only scientific source they cite in support of the fact that transwomen do not have an athletic advantage specifically refers only to those "following NCAA regulations", which require at least one year of hormone therapy.

Although the NCAA regulations themselves are inadequate given that this is all they require; they do not even specify dosage or resulting current testosterone levels.  

Freedom of Speech: What's the Standard of Harms of Speech Rights?

Some people say that there is no, and can be no, threat to free speech from cultural mores.  That's just consequences for your speech, which is other people using their speech to criticize you, or call for your firing or institutional/associational severance, or fire you or boycott you--which in themselves are just people exercising their rights not to associate with or support people they take to be bigots.  

None of this harms your freedom of speech, because it's not the government and people exercising their own freedom in this way does not stop you from speaking.  It's not true that these things means there are things that you can't say.  You can still say them.  These are just consequences of your speech.

But let's remember that government can't actually stop you from speaking either.  They can also only change the incentives, and provide consequences to do so.  

So those who argue that such cultural mores can't threaten freedom of speech are using the wrong standard to measure whether something harms freedom of speech, since under it even government imprisonment for stating certain propositions is not a speech injury since people can still choose to speak.

Refuting the Content by Focusing on the Speaker=Identity Politics?

Regarding the Harper's Letter, and the response that, for instance, Andrew Sullivan cheered on the Iraq War and was intolerant of those with dissenting views...

this is an argument for the truth of the Letter, surely.

That was bad then, and it produced bad consequences by tilting the public discourse against the side that would have made some move to deescalate. 

Only with an excessive focus on identity could this be seen as a response to the Letter, as opposed to a requisite focus on consequences and principles. 

How Many Sexes?

Anyone discussing the nature of sex and gender on the internet--especially in the context of transgender or DSD (intersex) issues--will likely have been sent millions of times seen this piece titled "Sex Redefined" in the journal Nature.

Just noting here a tweet by the author of the piece:

Not gonna find it now, but should file this with Anne Fausto-Sterling stating on social media that her "paper" about five sexes--males and females, but also herms, ferms, and merms--was "tongue in cheek" and that there aren't really five sexes.

-----

Might as well also note here this link about the creation of that Scientific American graphic showing sex as a spectrum using DSDs: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/visualizing-sex-as-a-spectrum/.  Didn't look too much at this yet, but of course the riposte is simple: what's the variable on the X axis?  Are some males really more male than others (which is an implication of it being a spectrum)?

An Early TRA Acknowledgement of Transgender-Feminist Tension?

When blogging this post, I looked at some other articles by the same transgender writer and found this interesting one from January 2016 titled, "Jaden Smith as a new face of womenswear might seem progressive - but he's on transgender territory." 

Jumping off from the announcement that Louis Vuitton had chosen Smith as the new face of its womenswear collection, the author of the piece argues that there is, at the least, a tension between the gender progress reflected by Jaden Smith's sartorial choices and the gender progress of transgender recognition and visibility: as the culture evolves to normalize men wearing women's clothes and vice versa without that being weird or wrong or undermining of men's manness or women's womanness, this cuts against transgender people's progress in attaining recognition and validation through their signalling their gender identification through their own clothing choices.

I bring this up here to point to the fact that woman called "TERFs" make this argument all the time--that gender identity doctrine reifies gender roles and stereotypes, and otherwise cuts against feminist fight against gender--and are condemned as bigots for it. 

Take the T Out? Drop the T? Get the L Out?

I recently came across this piece in The Independent (UK) entitled, "Why It's Time to Take the T Out of LGBT". 

It's by a transgender writer from 2015, and it argues that the T-LGB alliance should be rolled back as one is based on gender identity and the others on sexual orientation, and that combining the groups into a single coalition is confusing and even stigmatizing to transgender people by associating it with something sexual. 

I also recently saw a short video--looked like it was pulled from social media--from Fox Fisher making the same point, and arguing for the decoupling on grounds of political/rhetorical effectiveness. 

I'm just noting this as these days and for a few years, any mention by any LGB person of the possibility of splitting the coalition in the same way and for the same reason (political effectiveness of one's cause) is denounced as bigotry.

Athletic Contest Categories' Names: Men's & Women's vs. Open & Female

On the incendiary transgender athletes issue, a proposal commonly cited on the science/TERF side is to have two categories: female and open. 
That way, female athletes get an even playing field without the presence of male pubertal advantage, and transwoman athletes get to participate without being designated as "men". 

However, I'm remembering a feminist line of thinking from 2017 when the US National Women's Team won the World Cup:
it was argued that we should not call the events the World Cup and the Women's World Cup, since that presents men as universal and neutral, and women as niche.  Instead, it was said that we should call each the Men's World Cup and the Women's World Cup. 

So not sure how these two arguments stack up. 

Free Speech's Problem of Self-Reference

Most people, people who still broadly support free speech, maintain that some content-specific exceptions are justifiable, even obligatory.  They just disagree exactly on what those exceptions should be.

So can you really apply an exemption from free speech to the exemptions from free speech themselves?

Clinton on Manspreading

One recent illustration of why there are critiques of HRC's feminism from the structurally-minded left occurred previously:

at a recent event after the election, Hillary discussed meeting with Putin and how such environments are hostile for women.  She said that Putin "manspreaded" all over the place, offering a humorous demonstration even.

But this alleged "man spreading" robs the charge of all the significance that gave it legitimacy as a social phenomenon/issue.  The idea was born of crowded public transit, in which men's socialization allows them to take up more room then necessary and women's socialization influencing them to take up less, leading to a systemic result of more comfort for men and less for women as the men's expanse is at the women's expense.  Presumably, it applies to other situations in which the different gendered socializations causes the genders to systematically experience different outcomes in purportedly neutral circumstances.

But it doesn't apply to just preferences in sitting when there is no constraint on common space and no effect on anyone else.

Leave it to HRC to take a prima facie useful concept for a recently-conceived/articulated social issue and try to use it for the cool points, only to completely void the concept of any possible importance.

Incongruous

I often seek out Jill Filipovic's opinion on matters I'm interested, especially lately on some of the internecine left-of-center disputes like on "identity politics", the 2016 campaign, and Democratic strategy.  It's an application of the cherished principle that truth-seeking requires seeking out the best possible case for the other side.  I find her contributions to the discourse valuable and appreciate her insights and the clarity she brings in expressing them.  I almost always find her pieces persuasive, even if I don't find myself fully persuaded by them to exchange my own opinion for hers.  And I am especially appreciative of her habit of doing all this in from her particular perspective and working from her priors that are far from my own on certain dimensions, as I've endeavored greatly lately to address and incorporate the contributions that can be made from a perspective such as hers into my own views.

But--and this is not to talk Filipovic at all but only observe of the larger culture--I find it jarring to try and click through the author's page to read other of Filipovic's pieces and encounter this pop-up soliciting me to join their email list.  To the extent that the persistent gender gaps in areas of social concern as well as problems of sexual assault and health (and more) result at least somewhat from cultural cues telling girls that their only worth is their attractiveness, and in general being bombarded with images the inculcate a very particular and very difficult to attain beauty standard...

Impact, not Intent?

Calcifying into dogma in some left-of-center circles is the (proposed) principle expressed by phrases like "intent isn't magic" and "impact matters, not intent."  This is the kind of thing common in certain communities on social and online media, but also is the type of platitude uncritically accepted and then promulgated by administrators and their student activist confreres in contexts like orientation sessions for new students.  Imagine a fresh arrival on campus, maybe--for the vividness of the argument--think of a graduate student in ethics and moral philosophy, or a law student ready to pursue truth only to find some questions provided answers before any classes even begin, answers decided by non-academics and with an air of stipulation that brooks no criticism or dissent.

The more recent "oops/ouch" discursive instructions from a few schools are another example, provided that entailed along with having to say "oops" is an admission and acceptance that the "ouch"-causing utterance was wrongful and to refrain from repeating it or similar verbal "oops"s.

Plenty more could be said on the absurdity of this status of received wisdom being afforded to this particular principle ('impact, not intent'), but suffice it to say that this absurdity is underscored by the fact that someone like Kant ('nothing can be said to be unqualifiedly good other than a good will') is apparently ruled fully wrong not only a priori, but even without any argument at all.