We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
>(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.
> There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.
But that’s not how it’s defined. People have been using that word in every language humans ever invented for thousands of years to mean biological female. If you want to argue that there is something else that isn’t biological sex and you want to invent a word for it, go nuts, but “woman” is already defined. Words can and do change definitions over time, of course. If it’s your contention that the definition by consensus has already changed, say so, but there are billions of people on this earth who haven’t got the message, which seems odd for something determined by consensus of the people who use language.
Putting that aside, since sports are about physicality and accomplishing things in the real world, it makes no sense to base them on “identity” - something that cannot be detected or defined by anyone but the self identifier - rather they should be based on physical aspects of reality.
I’m not defending this definition, but I will point out that gender has never been about the chromosomes you were born with. It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.
Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.
I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports
Going even further back, gender denoted, originally, a linguistical construct associated with sex but not strictly dependent on it, as seen on romance languages like Spanish, Portuguese, etc. [1] There, words have their own gender and, sometimes, the gender of the word and the sex/social gender of the subject may disagree. Ex.: "ant" in Spanish is "hormiga", but this noun is exclusively feminine with no masculine form.
> It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.
I don't know any culture which defined gender by how you dress and how long your hair is rather than what is between your legs. You would be called a girly boy or a boyish girl.
So girly and boyish is how you are perceived, girl and boy is your sex, that is how almost every culture defined it through all time.
>except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt
"I took a drug, therefore I am now a woman" is not a reasonable position to hold. The debate starts out with one based on an identity, and then in the very next formulation reduces that identity to which medicines you take.
No, but that’s not what the statement is saying. It’s arguing that we should add the minimum restrictions we can to the women’s sports category and that hormones might be a reasonable one
This started out with a claim that “trans women are women full stop”, which implies that there’s no difference in the categories, and has since retreated to “in order for trans women to compete as women, they have to take these medicines”.
This implies that males who identify as women but do not undergo HRT are not women in the context of sports (and their gender in other contexts remains ill defined, especially in the absence of perverse incentive). This is a form of misgendering, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.
This is a position that one could take up, but it comes
at a steep cost. It holds the societal acceptance of
transgenderism hostage to a biological account of
sex-gender. This is problematic for several reasons.
Moreover, it is worth highlighting the problems with
suggesting that sex, as biologically based, determines
the gender with which one psychologically identifies
[...] Second, whatever criterion is offered to ground
this similarity would inevitably disqualify many women,
for not all women share the same hormone levels,
reproductive capacity, gonadal structure, genital
makeup, and so on. (Tuvel 2017)
Again I don’t take it be saying that. It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic so we should require hrt so that elite sport doesn’t require trans women to skip hrt
Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..." again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.
> It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic
This was never said by anyone until you came along with that comment, which is a totally different idea (effectively a non sequitur). Can you quote who echoed the same argument?
I said "Sports should only be segregated by this <gender identity> category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt"
That was trying to elaborate on citruscomputing's argument where they said "Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care."
I'm rephrasing those two points. Apologies if I initially described that badly, but I'm just restating the perverse incentive they were talking about
> When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around and re-defined post-hoc, such that "tails I win, heads you lose."
Axioms must be seen through to their conclusions, not accepted halfway and then abandoned for some other set of assumptions the instant you start running into paradoxes. You cannot simultaneously use ZFC and the New Foundations (without Choice); the system must remain internally consistent and coherent, there is no mixing and matching.
Ontology is found to be a subdiscipline of metaphysics (Wikipedia). Quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist gender theory professor:
“transsexual claims to belong to a sex do not appear to be metaphysically
justified: they are claims that self-identities ought to be definitive in
terms of the question of sex membership and gendered treatment. They are
therefore political in nature” (Bettcher 2014, 387).
I am not sure, since this article uses sex and gender in senses that are entirely inverse to the common ones in 2026. How do you define those terms?
In particular, the 2026 senses are that sex is an immutable biological characteristic based on karyotype and gametes; gender is a social construct, and this is why it can be "transitioned."
The cited article nonetheless uses the archaic terminology "transsexual" to refer to what we today know as "transgender."
Now you see the linguistic ambiguity we are mired in? Can you clarify?
If we’re going to take an ontological approach, is there a stable non-tautological definition of “woman” that admits your definition of the subcategory?
It's being built as we speak. I attended at a city council meeting yesterday, discussing approving a contract for ALPR cameras. I learned about a product from the camera vendor called Fusus[0], a dashboard that integrates various camera systems, ALPRs, alerts, etc. Two things stood out to me: natural-language querying of video feeds, and future planned integration with civilian-deployed cameras. The city only had budget for 50 ALPRs, and they stressed how they're only deploying them on main streets, but it seems like only a matter of time before your neighbor is able to install a camera that feeds right into the local PD's AI-enabled systems. One council member raised concerns about integrations with the citizen app[1] specifically (and a few others I didn't catch the names of). I'm very worried about where all this is heading.
I live in Oxford, UK and walked past a police van that said "automatic facial recognition in use". Not exactly a good sign without any caveats. I imagine they recorded me staring at their van.
It's already happening. Someone local to me seems to be spray-painting over ring cameras and leaving flyers about the ring-flock-ice connection. I can't say I agree with the methods, but it is sending a message.
Some of these companies have (local) law enforcement subscriptions, and default opt-in disclaimers throughout their ToS to make it all tidy and legal.
None of them have contracts with, nor can they sell to, federal agencies. Agencies have to provide a warrant, and the processes are verified through each of the companies' respective legal teams.
Their recordings data is not generally available for sale; that's a legal minefield, but there are official channels to go through. Geofence warrants and things like that aren't conducive to real-time surveillance, and the practice of using those types of reverse-search , differential analysis uses of sensitive data is under review by the Supreme Court; it's thought that they're going to weigh in on the side of the 4th amendment and prohibit overbroad fishing expeditions, even if there's snazzy math behind it.
TLDR; They need to pay the company, either via subscription or direct charge for T&M, require warrants, and the use is limited in scope. It's burdensome and expensive enough that they're not going to be using it for arbitrary random "let's scan everyone's doorbell cams in case there's an illegal immigrant!" situations, but if there's a drug dealer, violent offender, or some specific high value target, they're going to use the broad surveillance tools wherever they can.
"computer, search the entire flock database (which in partnership with ring also includes everybody's doorbell and security cameras[0]) for this minority, and plot a map of their whereabouts over time[1]"
At this point, I don't mind the methods. Shit is far gone if you're actively enabling the surveillance state, people have a right to fight back. I'm sure this won't go over well here.
I’m not sure destroying other people’s property is the best way to make them sympathetic to your cause.
I don’t own a Ring camera (or any similar device), but the idea that someone could spend time unnoticed on my porch, messing with my stuff, right where my daughter likes to play on weekends, makes my skin crawl.
If that happened to me, I’d probably just double down on security to be honest. Knowing that some people actually feel it's the right thing to do makes me wonder if I shouldn't start today.
To be clear, I have no issue with someone peacefully informing people in their neighborhood about the potential dire consequences of enabling "share images of my doorbell with the government or other private agencies", that's all fine to me. But if you feel the need to impose your views by harassing me about it or by breaking the law to get your point across, you won't get an ally in me.
It's always the same. Go back and think about the history you read and stories you've loved. Were you upset when the Rebels destroyed the Empire's property? Should they not have blown up the death star? Should they have gone through "proper channels". Go look at any revolution that you side with, tell me they didn't destroy property. I understand your comfortable but there are literally minorities, often times US citizens, getting rounded up and denied their rights. So you can sit idly by and criticize those that fight this system. However, you are so obviously on the wrong side of history and you would recognize it in any other era except your own.
> I’m not sure destroying other people’s property is the best way to make them sympathetic to your cause.
We're in a slow moving civil war at this point. Looking for sympathy stopped making sense a long time ago. You're either pro humanity or pro property tbh
>We're in a slow moving civil war at this point [...] You're either pro humanity or pro property tbh
You don't realize this type of thinking is exactly what contributes to the "civil war"? Same with all this virtue signaling where if you're even slightly for some sort of immigration enforcement you're labeled as not being "pro humanity" or whatever, and then a populist gets in power because the other side's rallying cry is "there's no illegal on stolen land". In the wake of the killing of Renée Good, Trump's approval on immigration was 48% approve to 52% disapprove. In the same survey, who do you think voters trusted more on immigration? Still Republicans, 44% to 33%.
> You don't realize this type of thinking is exactly what contributes to the "civil war"?
Of course. But we need meaning and values in our lives, both of which have been absent from politics my entire life. At some point we're due for course correction, or I can't bear to live here anymore.
> if you're even slightly for some sort of immigration enforcement you're labeled as not being "pro humanity" or whatever, and then a populist gets in power because the other side's rallying cry is "there's no illegal on stolen land".
Both of these people are liberals detached from reality. The opposing side would stand for better material conditions for everyone.
If you're not going to ally with the people fighting the surveillance systems that are currently being used by the secret police to disappear and kill people what does that make you. My cause doesn't need your sympathy it needs to stop this horror. I'm not quite saying "with or against" but you are saying "against."
>If you're not going to ally with the people fighting the surveillance systems that are currently being used by the secret police to disappear and kill people what does that make you.
1990s Ireland:
A: "hey guys, maybe it's a bad idea to set off bombs in public places to promote Irish independence. You won't get an ally in me."
B: "If you're not going to ally with the people fighting British that are currently subjugating the Irish what does that make you. My cause doesn't need your sympathy it needs to stop this horror. I'm not quite saying "with or against" but you are saying "against.""
Just something to point out I think, by being out in public you basically implicitly consent to being surveilled You can't have an expectation of privacy while in the public.
This is usually the rule that's used to avoid getting the general public's consent to he photographed when you are out taking pictures of buildings or something.
Oh, this will be very useful. My current solution is incredibly hacky, I run an unauthenticated SSH server on the Kindle (key-based wasn't working), port scan to find it, and SFTP new files. At home, at least, I have a static IP. The whole system falls apart enough that I usually just connect to calibre's remote server and send books that way, though. I wonder what the battery impact of running tailscale on a Kindle is.
My coworkers are shocked and confused that I own/use a sewing machine and see at as some legacy old timey thing. It's true that you certainly don't need to own one anymore and you won't save any money making your own clothes. But you can modify and make loads of custom cool stuff that are impossible to buy new.
I've got a few things I made that just bring a lot of joy knowing it's the exact thing I wanted which you can't buy, and couldn't justify paying someone else to make either.
Right now the solution that makes the most sense to me is intentional communities. If anyone reading this has experience living in one, I'd love to chat. Email is in profile.
I think you might be mistaking the "thin blue line" concept with the "blue / all lives matter" in this case, thin blue line is neither new nor newly popular with BLM.
Certainly more popular since then; probably swept along by "blue lives matter". Have you seen that black-and-blue version of the American flag, with, what is it, six or seven blue stripes (or lines)? How old is that?
> I got the distinct feeling that she really died and that I was just in a very long dream in which she survived, and that I would wake up very soon to a world of sorrow.
This is how I've felt every time a friend has tried and failed to commit suicide. I'm so sorry.
Similar story to you with non-celiac gluten sensitivity: I was having disabling flank pain for months, but after ruling out a couple things they shrugged and gave me an IBS diagnosis and a prescription for a drug with bad long-term side effects. Someone suggested cutting out gluten, which I tried and the pain went away. Intentional and unintentional reintroduction of gluten leads to the pain coming back within a few hours.
Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
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