The inevitable downside of bathroom gender policing

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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It amounts to the same thing. If men who claim to ‘feel’ like women are allowed into women’s spaces then all men are. There are no more women’s spaces. Do you seriously not understand that? And while you insist on using the ideologically-charged but meaningless word ‘gender’ then you are never going to be able to reasoned with. It only started being used as a SYNONYM for ‘sex’ because puritanical Americans were too coy to use the word ‘sex’, hence your ‘gender reveal’ parties (or do you think they refer to ‘gender identity’?). Your mind is set on your partisan political agenda. You don’t give a crap about women. That’s your prerogative but at least be honest about it.

Unless you are a man wanting to hang in women’s toilets and changing rooms then it doesn’t affect you one iota.

I don’t know if it’s ever been a criminal offence. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t. It was always understood that there was something deeply wrong with men who attempted it. It was taboo. Now that’s no longer the case and predatory men are taking full advantage. The only way to make it taboo again is to criminalise it. It never has to get to prosecution. All MEN have to do is stay out of women’s toilets (another ‘naughty’ word that Americans are too coy to use) and changing rooms etc. It’s not that difficult. I have no interest in MEN claiming to know what it feels like to be a woman. It’s absurd and makes no logical or scientific sense. The fact is that they are men, and that’s never going to change no matter how erotic it feels to claim otherwise. It’s MEN, by their own actions, who have forced it into becoming a criminal offence. Because of the actions of men, women now need the protection of the law. It’s not our fault the human race has gone insane in the last decade.

The term ‘gender identity’ should be outlawed as ‘hate speech’. It would solve all of this bullshit in one fell swoop.

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207

In the ship of Theseus problem, the problem arises in that a ship is something manmade. Now, if you replace the ship for something natural, say, the tree of Theseus, it’d fairly simple to notice that the tree that was pointed at is what is natural, not what is modified. Say you have a limb cut off, and with enough technology you get a new arm. You may identify that arm as part of you, but it’d make more sense to point out that that arm isn’t you in the same way as your car isn’t you, no matter how good you drive it and like it.

Same with modified genetics - I’d say that the human is what is naturally ocurring, not the edited thing, and you may say: your body includes a tumor we removed, and I’d agree.

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Yes ‘The West’ has gone collectively insane but there are still some pockets of sanity. They will eventually dry up though unless a cure is found but that’s unlikely because the seed was planted in children a long time ago and has been germinating and growing ever since. Those first children are now adults who are planting the same seed in the next generation and on it goes. Changing their mindset is as difficult as changing the mindset of anyone else who has been indoctrinated into a religious belief system. It’s no different.

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Exactly. You are minimizing the damage instead of nullifying it, and i am asking you why.
Why is “minimizing” the damage a better option than advocating for an option that nullifies damage?
What is the reasoning behind that?
Why is that not your default option to pick?

First: It solves and nullifies the problem. What is likely and not likely was never a question here.
Second: Exactly because we are talking about less than a percent of the population, creating facilities for them would be a miniscule of expense

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Now you are bringing science fiction into your ‘argument’? Talk about clutching at straws.

‘‘If we find a way to miraculously transform a man into a woman and wipe out his puberty and previous life experience then women will still not want that person in their spaces’’ That’s as nonsensical as saying ‘‘If we can find a way to bring people back to life after being murdered then people will STILL want to keep murder illegal’’.

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But you don’t mind if women are criminalised for objecting to men in their toilets etc. which is what happens when ‘g**der self ID’ is made a legal definition.

I’m pretty sure it has never been illegal for men to use women’s facilities. It was a social contract that worked for a very long time. No one thought to bring it into law. Why would they? People used to know what men and women were. No one foresaw that women would be essentially erased from existence because the definition becomes ‘anyone who says they are one’. If you don’t believe me then ask any politician to define the word ‘woman’.

‘G**der self ID’ has opened a Pandora’s box of unforseen problems. What once seemed harmless and a ‘kindness’ has only brought to the surface the male need for control over women (oops, ‘cervix havers’) and innate misogyny of society in general.

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No it doesn’t. Bathrooms are a specific space, and the same logic does not apply to all spaces that might be sex- or gender-segregated.

Nor does permitting anyone who sincerely identifies as woman into a space amount to letting men into the space.

Gender has been used to refer to human sexual dimorphism since the 1400s. The sense in which I’m using it, to refer to the social and cultural elements of sex, is from the mid 60s.

I see what you’re saying, but I tend to go in the other direction, and say that the car is you for some purposes. We treat human identity as quasi-magical and not following typical rules of identity, and though I understand the impulse, I think it’s often a mistake. When I install a hard drive or upgrade the RAM in my computer, it’s still my computer, and though I value my computer, I’m not tempted to keep the old RAM sticks because they’re ‘part of my computer’.

But whether or not we call the genetically modified person ‘real’, the more important question is what changes about how we treat humans as parts of what it means to be human change.

I think you are interpreting “minimizing” to mean something like ‘not caring sufficiently about rapes’, but I am using it to mean ‘reducing the number of rapes to the lowest achievable number of rapes’.

Minimizing rapes in prison seems to be a shared goal in that sense, right? We should pick policies that reduce the total amount of prison rape as much as possible?

I’m using a hypothetical to get at some of the underlying intuitions, yes.
Are you familiar with philosophy?

Not for merely objecting, no.

But worth noting that the idea that people should not be harassed while using the bathroom is actually a big part of your argument too.

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Yes, it does.

Ridiculous garbage.

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That’s particular of you. I disagree and I’d say most people would. It seems you are confusing identity with identification: They’re very different things. One is what you are, the other is a figment of your imagination, which you wouldn’t have if you didn’t have your identity.

You see that in the case of the machine you pointed out, that’s a manmade thing. If we were to treat people as parts, you’d be half your mother and half your father, and a quarter of each of your grandparents, and so on. It doesn’t work that way.

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Earlier, you gave a thumbs-down to a post where I presented the shenanigans of “Joey Salads,” a self-proclaimed prankster…

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…who, in a “social experiment” prank, donned a wig and a dress in order to walk into a women’s restroom claiming to be a transgender female.

So, are we to understand…

(based on your thumbs-down response to what I felt was a completely rational post)

…that if Mr. Salads, or some other similarly dressed male…

(as in one with more nefarious intentions, indeed, how would you possibly know?)

…were to follow your, say, 7-year-old daughter into a women-only restroom,…

…again, are we to understand that you would be completely fine with “risking the possibility” of him being an actual pervert who will expose his penis to your little girl (or do something far worse)?

I’m all for being fair and empathetic with humans who are truly experiencing gender dysphoria, but you really need to re-evaluate your stance on this issue.

For the life of me, I cannot fathom why you would give a thumbs-down to a post where I stated the following…

The bottom line is that we need to come up with a solution to the gender dysphoria issue that is not only empathetic of those who (for whatever reason) truly experience such psychological aberrations,…

…but it must be a solution that will never - under any circumstances - subject our moms, sisters, wives, daughters, girlfriends, etc., etc., to such an obvious danger.

What, exactly, was your problem with that.^^^

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OK, you’ve convinced me, let’s ban self-proclaimed pranksters from bathrooms.

The danger of self-proclaimed pranksters?

Because you took an example of someone doing something wrong to do in a bathroom, regardless of sex or gender, then listed every version of ‘woman’ you could think of (which doesn’t include women-qua-women, only women as accessories to men), and then ended on “obvious danger” as though you’d said anything more than threatening than “prankster”.

It’s not an argument or a thoughtful engagement with the topic, it’s propaganda.

Boo I say, and thumbs down.

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No. I understand what you meant and said.
And i am telling you that there is an option that does not minimize the number, but eliminates it. Meaning zero. And im asking you why thats not your default choice.

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Let’s recap:

Did you confuse identity with identification? I know it’s usual nowadays. Now, no amount of technology (even when it doesn’t exist) turns a human female into a male, since that is chromosomical. Primary sexual characteristics are not interchangeable, and I’ll give you that we’ll test if that is the case when that technology of changing all sexual chromosomes of a human becomes available.

The bathrooms are distinguished by chromosomes, because what that avoids is the worst case scenario: unwanted offspring coming from the use of bathrooms.

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First of all, to be pedantic, if the minimum is zero, then minimizing rapes means zero rapes.

But I have no idea why you believe zero is one of the two possible results from this specific policy. There are hundreds of rapes in UK prisons every year (data from 2019 appears to be the most recent available), and nearly all of it is not committed by transgender prisoners. I linked a study on US prisons above, that found that 20% of women and 4% of men had been sexually assaulted, and 3% and 1.5% respectively had been raped. A lot the sexual assault, on both men and women, was done by the guards.

If transgender prisoners simply didn’t exist, there would still be lots and lots of rape in prison.

So where are you getting zero?

These claims seem inconsistent. If my body includes the tumor (which I don’t agree with), why doens’t my mother’s include the eggs and my father’s the sperm?

The reason I think the car is ‘part of a you’ (and again I mean that in a limited sense) is that we start to include the car in our sense of self as if the car is part of us as we become familiar with it. For example, people’s begin to perceive to threats and damage to their car as they do to threats and damage to their bodies.

If I got a new arm, my experienced sense of self would absolutely extend to that arm, and not to the limb that was detached from my body.

In practice they aren’t, because chromosomes aren’t tested at birth and sex is assigned based on a visual inspection of the genitals, which lines up imperfectly with chromosomal sex. Exceptions are rare but real, and those people use the bathroom they feel comfortable using.

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This is the third time you derailed. Okay. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and explain it in its fullest.

You are arguing for minimizing damages by putting trans women into women’s prisons, because that is less (not none) damage than leaving them in men’s prisons where they are targeted.
I argue for putting them in a separate system altogether, which then will bring this number to exactly zero. They wont be hurt by males and they wont hurt females.

So between those two options, you are repeatedly picking the prior, the “lesser” number, instead of zero, and for the … i donno, 4th time? I ask of you why that is your default response?
What makes you go with putting them into women’s prisons and putting women at risk, rather than letting everyone have their separate spaces?

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I can only think that’s inconsistent if you think you are your body. You are not necessarily your body. For example, when you’re unconscious, you aren’t there, your body is.

That’s identification, not identity. You may identify with such and such, but that makes no distinction in your identity (who you are). Threats to things that are mine or that I care for are treated as such, no identification needed.

If you got a new arm, your identification would extend to that arm, in your case: I agree.

Yes, that’s the problem: choosing that basing on comfortability is baseless. You are right, it’s not based on chromosomes but is based on sex, and policed by watching for markers of sex (not gender).

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Ah, I see the disconnect. I haven’t engaged with the suggestion to create a separate system, other than to say that I find it unrealistic. I should have addressed it more directly, at least sufficiently to make clear that I wasn’t referring to it. I’ll say more about it below.

But just to be explicit about my position: I’m saying, as between putting them in women’s prisons and putting them in men’s prisons, it’s reasonable and defensible to put them in women’s prisons, and doing so likely reduces the total number of rapes in prison.

To the separate system:

First, it doesn’t exist. That’s relevant, because even if there were traction to build it (which there isn’t and I doubt there ever will be), it would take time and there are transwomen in the prison system now. So where to put transwomen now is the more pressing question.

Second, a separate system is not a free lunch or a minuscule expense. It will cost money to build, and because of economies of scale it will cost more per prisoner to operate. Those costs are prohibitive in their own right, but also if the point is to lower the incidence of prison rape, it isn’t clear that is the most efficient way to target the problem.

Third, it isn’t even clear that it will do much to address the problem of prison rape. Men in men’s prison are raped; women in women’s prison are raped; why should we assume that transwomen in transwomen’s prison will not be raped? It’s an unreasonable assumption that this option represents “zero”.

I’m open to the possibility (but skeptical) that a third system could be part of a broader solution. But in the meantime, we should choose from the options we actually have available today in a way that minimizes rape in prison.

OK, so you’re defining is a trichotomy: ‘body’ vs ‘identity’ vs ‘identification’? And chromosomes are part of ‘identity’? Is the ‘human’ in the claim “the human is what is naturally ocurring” the ‘body’, the ‘identity’, or the ‘identification’?

Is bathroom use decided by the ‘body’, the ‘identity’, or the ‘identification’? Why?

The publicly available “markers of sex” are gender.

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I don’t get what you mean, but to make it short, the bathroom is decided by the body, yes. If at night you went to sleep and woke up controlling and interacting with another person’s body of the other sex instead of the one you are used to, you would have to go to the other bathroom.

Identity is who you are.

Your body is a human body

Identification is how people think self and others. For example, there is self-identification (‘I’m a Chelsea fan’) and identification by others (‘that’s a Manchester fan’).

No. For example, I have no gender. The markers relate to the body, which has no gender either.

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Correct. And obviously, that happens at the cost and safety of women.

Thats simply a red herring. We are talking in hypotheticals to begin with and if we wanted to start such a system it’d take little more than one institution due to the small size of the specific group.
In fact, it might even not need building, just restructuring.

Also a red herring. The state’s inability to manage itself correctly is a very wild direction to take this into. First cause it has nothing to do with the topic at large, second because its also true for any other of the issues.
Lastly: Even if i were to engage with this argument, It’d still not cost more to operate than any other prison system. Nothing says you need to build a system to house 10 million people when the sample size you are working with is in the tens or hundreds of thousands, but again, this is about the government’s ability to work correctly.

Lastly, this is also a red herring. What they do to eachother is a separate issue entirely. We were talking specifically about bathroom gender policing, so gender segregation.
As such, the instances of “trans women” abusing women in women’s prisons, would drop to zero. Trans women BEING abused in male prisons, would also drop to zero.

To summarize your position:
You are saying little more than its cheaper and a “good enough” solution if women get raped and abused.
Alas, to me thats neither a morally or intellectually sound position.

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I have avoided this thread till now, but my response to
any of this is simple, these ‘‘solutions’’ of a third prison,
or separating inmates by sex or ‘‘murdering’’ trans people,
all fail because they are ‘‘ad hoc’’ solutions… ‘‘ad hoc’’
of the moment, temporary solutions that really solve nothing…

and the reason for that is in America anyway, we are confused as
to the entire point of prison… America has for decades, been
faced with a problem it won’t address… what exactly is the point
of prison? is prison to punish or is prison to be us as rehabilitation?
American’s have turned prisons into big business… the point to
make money is to have as many people in prison as possible…
and by the immigrants’ prisons, they have achieved just that…
only in America would building more prison than schools make
sense…and we spend vastly more money on our prisons and
justice system then we do on schools and basic entitlement
programs…and in a remarkable display of ignorance, the
money we spend on the military could feed, house, send to
collage and increase Social Security and Medicare programs
for every single person in America…
one simple way to reduce the prison population is simply by
drug and alcohol programs with mental health programs…
we could reduce the prison population and save ourselves
billions upon billions of dollars…

you want changes in prisons; you have to change the original
conditions that force people into prison…and that by itself,
will help alleviate the trans people problem within prisons…
Is this going to a silver bullet that solves all the prisons problems?
No, of course not, but it is a start…

Kropotkin

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