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?

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.  

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.  

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.

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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. 

Anthony Kennedy's Jurisprudence, Value-Neutrality, and Freedom for Legal Obligation

Does the constitutional principle, one that I associate with Anthony Kennedy most, that people have the right, and the constitution protects this, to define the good life, conception of the good and the good life, the meaning of life, life's value, morality, the summum bonum for themselves, and that this principle forbids legislation that hampers that and people's pursuit/promotion/implementation of their own personal sense/value/view of the good.

But if this is true, then can we even reject internally inconsistent ones?
Even if we say, yes we can
This still leaves many, social darwinism for just one example, conceivable/possible moral conceptions of the good that are internally inconsistent (no matter how implausible or arbitrary or random or fortuitously coincidental given the preferences of those who espouse them) but grievously undesirable and wrong.

Would such a conception of the good that requires murder or theft or assault, like a religion that requires unwilling human sacrifice or a moral nonrealist sociopath, or etc., justify legally proscribed actions and invalidate the laws prohibiting them, at least in these cases/exceptions?

Presumably no, but that means then that this right to define one's own conception of the good, which is really (at least seems like) value-neutrality, does not necessarily invalidate prohibitions, and thus cannot be the sole premise in a sound argument for the rights to establish a freedom and invalidate (again, in any way) its prohibition.

Free and Public Speech and Value-Neutrality: Public Sex & Nudity, Body Image, Social Roles, Sexual Assault, Media and Other Representation, and General Activism

David Frum scoffs at efforts to remove or change a large public billboard advertisement for a fitness product that features a sexy, fit woman in a small bikini
as obviously wrong

But if we already have and accept laws against public/the public presentation of drug use (public drinking) and public nudity and public sex actions and even depictions, pictures or video, of nudity and sex acts, then surely we've already violated value-neutrality, and certainly have violated (freedom of speech's) content-neutrality of/for (regulation of) public speech and expression.  

So what's the problem then with further restricting public speech some degree tighter than it is now, even if just to include images and media that uphold/propagate social roles and impossible ideals, and lead to body negativity, body image health issues and psychological issues in high numbers, and sexual assault issues, and gender identity issues, and economic and educational and racial bias/racist prejudice,
given how bad we know these things are right now (and how bad the various ideas to address them are right now, and how bad the general politics of the issue is--not amenable to good solution/policy/practical conclusions/choices and very amenable to false accusations, bad arguments, etc.)

I oppose regulating all speech that is contained to those who positively consent to hearing it, but unless you want to be forced to allow public nudity and public sex acts and/or depictions of them, (etc)...


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dafd
My little reading on culture has shown how people pass down values and attitudes (culture) intergenerational and socially/in a socially diffuse way.
To the extent that the culture passed down can be the CoP
it may be inferred that people need positive role models, since they need "models for life"/examples of living, etc.
This is why gender and racial and queer representation is important, especially with regard to not only positive examples but much less negative stereotypical examples that reinforce negative stereotypes.

Identitarian Deference in Abortion Rights Rhetoric

I just realized another long-standing example of "identitarian deference" that I never noticed/recognized before:

"it you don't have a uterus, you do not get a vote"

"if you're not a woman, you don't get an opinion on this issue"

This is a very long-standing, from as far back as I can remember following politics, argument/piece of rhetoric/retort used by pro-choice women (and even some men) on the left to argue against pro-life men.

When in the past I've been thinking about how best to argue against some of these more risky/destructive tendencies, I've tried to recall previous examples of identity politics and identitarian deference ad hominems to show how the approach is fallacious; I especially tried to show them examples of conservative ad hominem fallacies that they might have decried as fallacious at the time and still would have the partisan amenability to that judgment.
But I was also trying to identity past examples of erroneous identity politics and identitarian deference in general, including on the left, in order in part to discover whether recent developments, in identity politics and PC--especially on campus, really represent a change on the political scene, whether there really was something new.
Even when I was recently casting about for specific identifiable examples of earlier lefty identitarianism, I didn't think of this.  Could mean nothing, but could be because of how deep this was engrained and normalized...

***

Incidentally, the current line on gender identity and trans rights would invalidate/preclude this rule anyway, since men and women can no longer be assumed to have penises and vaginas, respectively, and in general that there is no external way to determine whether they have a uterus or not--and asking them is rude and verifying is assault and insult.  

Judith Butler & Trans-vs-TERF

So is Judith Butler a TERF or not?  "Gender performativity" makes it sound like she would be, similar to as RRC is accused of being.

But she gets absolved in this post?

It sounds to me like she escapes the label now only because she refrains from and declares her intention to refrain from spelling out that conclusion or talking about this particular opinion at all.

We agree, radfems and trans theorists, that gender is an oppressive system of unequal social classes, so radfems and you can't blame people for how they choose to deal with that oppression.

Liberal Universalism or Identity Politics: Empty the Categories of All Social Significance or Not?

Imagine if we have gender-neutral policy, based on a commitment to classical/political liberalism with its universalism that seeks to divorce the significance of socially-arbitrary/irrelevant social categories, and thus do not use the concept of gender in any legislation or regulation/policy, and don’t acknowledge/look at/notice/document gender when researching outcomes and policy problems and solutions.  Thus, when we looked at income distribution and income inequality, to investigate its legitimacy/whether its ok or not/how it’s caused/etc., we would simply see women’s incomes alongside men’s/the rest of the population’s/the general population’s, and would not be able to see/recognize their disparity as a class, as something they experience for similar reasons and in a common way.  Thus, we wouldn’t be able to analyze it for its nature, justification/legitimacy, its causes and solutions.

—So this looks like my ending thought about gender critical feminism and the abolition of gender: 

-we can reject and end the use and maintenance of the categories/social classes of gender…RRC may want to abolish gender as a social class, abolish all social classes based on biology/sex, but she is sure to create the category again to discuss the material problems that all vagina-having people share. 

-we may try to implement Liberal Universalism all the way and fully empty the arbitrary/morally-irrelevant categories of people of all social significance//practical implications/significance, but that will blind us to/can potentially blind us to possible ways that people can be oppressed for their identities.  

(((**This sounds like the question that Butler was addressing in Gender Trouble: can you do feminism without a concept of woman?  If the concept is the means of oppression, can you abolish it without losing the ability to recognize and analyze the systemic oppression that affects all similar people in the same way because of the same causes?** [http://lauragonzalez.com/TC/BUTLER_gender_trouble.pdf])))

—In this way, emptying these arbitrary categories of social signifiance/practicel implications is a CAP—which is just what Noah Smith observed before of being colorblind in action/treatment/policy.

Either we can be non-(gender-neutral/colorblind) and allow for and accept/tolerate racially unequal outcomes that result from certain contingent facts 

One option is we can be (gender-neutral/colorblind) and allow for and accept/tolerate racially unequal outcomes that result from certain contingent facts operating within our neutral system.  

The other option is we can recognize these empirical facts that disadvantage certain people (physical differences like in terms of reproductive role for the subjection of women; psychological facts with some socialized, but at least some innate; for example, categorization, likeness and in-/-outgroup dynamics, bias, cross-race identification, etc.) and realize that they would result under a regime of gender-neutral/colorblind policy in an unjust outcome.

A large class of people with a common characteristic, an arbitrary, morally-irrelevant fact about their identity that they did not choose and do not control, are experiencing life outcomes worse than they otherwise would/could be through no fault of their own.

Even if it’s not dependent solely on the facially neutral system, but in fact requires also the other facts—and in fact would not exist under the same (facially) neutral system if these empirical facts were otherwise—once you know about the outcome(s) and why and accept it, you are responsible for the outcome yourself.    

So, instead of the neutral system, you craft one recognizing and taking into account those empirical facts, and craft it to avoid those potential injustices.  The outcome is more just.

But you have also crafted policy that presupposes and depends on certain empirical facts, including people being racist.  

(This is like what XXX argued to me when I suggested that maybe a “punch up, not down” rule could account for the rationality/reasonableness/plausibility of/coherence of/internal inconsistency of/consistency of a certain social phenomenon he accused of hypocrisy: adopting this rule would require defining which groups are up and which are down, which literally requires defining a hierarchy of classes).

     ——

But if I’m right here in identifying the value of identity politics, there is no identitarian deference called for.

"Am I Cisgender?"

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper does something really clever here that enables her to essentially argue that the concept of a transgender identity is incoherent--in other words, articulate the "terf" position with a priori arguments alone, and so without relying on any contestable value or faith claims, or personal animus--while talking only about and for herself and thus without writing about and criticizing other people and their beliefs.  She does this by beginning her path to an analysis of the trans concept with an analysis of how she identifies and whether, not believing herself to be trans, she should identify herself as cis.

Of course, this doesn't prevent her from being attacked as anti-trans and a positive threat to trans people anyway.