Save Women's Sport - the pearl clutching begins

[VALuvsMKwan]

I can go down to at most 0.75 knowing that she has stopped going to those bars (and therefore any bar) and I know she really, really wanted to go to those bars. Because of covid the kids have had no opportunities to meet like-minded young women. The other friends are all serious and nerdy young women. I don't believe it is hyperbole.

Maybe we should try the places when one of you come down here. The proof is in the pudding.

EVERY bar that is Lesbian-friendly has people who exhibit this behavio(u)r?

Not having lived in or ever visited Paris, that is very odd based on my experience here in the US, where that sort of aggressive (let's call it what it is) harassment would be shut down very quickly by the bar's owners and management.

 

[Asli]

EVERY bar that is Lesbian-friendly has people who exhibit this behavio(u)r?

Not having lived in or ever visited Paris, that is very odd based on my experience here in the US, where that sort of aggressive (let's call it what it is) harassment would be shut down very quickly by the bar's owners and management.

I think only five mainly lesbian bars are left (compared to dozens of gay bars) and they weren't all exclusive to women, even before the definition of woman has changed.

After a quick search, I can see that in Lyon women were complaining that only one bar was left a couple of years ago, with several closing. In Marseille many have closed as well.

You can make searches in forums if you're interested. There are comments on why lesbian places are closing.

I've never been to a lesbian bar, but in any sort of place in Paris, hitting on people can be pretty aggressive, with much less political correctness.

ETA: Independently of being hit on or not, my daughter is young and feels safer in a female-only place if everyone is drinking.

 

[MacMadame]

You speak as if "these parts of the world" are anecdotal.

I don't understand what that means. Don't you agree that different parts of the world have different approaches ranging from outright hostility to acceptance and access to decent medical care?

- In abusive regimes, young athletes being pressured or forced to transition in order to bring medals home seems like an obvious horror waiting to happen. We know that sport is a political weapon and individuals are used as pawns by other people and entities. I can't imagine that not happening, sadly. And then people turning round and claiming it couldn't have been predicted.

Trans athletes have been allowed in competition at the Olympics since 2001. That's 21 years, two decades. Don't you think, if this was going to happen, it would have already happened?

You ask who is being told they are oppressors

I asked who is telling 8-year-olds they are oppressors.

The judge says “I can accept, at any rate for present purposes, that the unconditional introduction of a transgender woman into the general population of a women’s prison carries a statistically greater risk of sexual assault upon non-transgender prisoners than would be the case if a non-transgender woman were introduced."

The judge also said that it's not clear how prevalent this problem is. IOW, it could have been a one-off.

Some people believe Black people are inherently violent. If a Black woman had sexually assaulted a prisoner, would people be saying they shouldn't be in the same prison as white women? The people who believe that Black people are violent might.

Some people suck and they suck regardless of their gender, their sex, their religion, and a host of other attributes. But people will generalize especially when it suits their argument

Not enough research exists to establish whether amongst the population of transgender women, rates of offending align more with those of women or of men.

I suspect that isn't true. And, sure enough, a simple Google search shows that it has been studied and continues to be studied.

You tell me what gender is if it isn't a social construct that was created by society to buttress the existing power structure. What is it?

In patriarchal societies, it's used by the patriarchy to keep people in their place. But in societies that are accepting of differences in gender expression, it is not. Some indigenous tribes recognized more than two genders, for example, and others didn't really think about people in terms of gender at all (until they were colonized). So gender wasn't used to buttress the existing power structure there.

Do people really think it is so clear and easy to accept that anatomy is irrelevant to what sex a person is?

Did you mean to say "gender"? Because anatomy is sex and I don't know any trans person who denies that. They just believe that gender is more than anatomy.

Calling people TERFs

To be clear, this is a name that TERFs came up with to label themselves. It's not something other people made up to insult them.

 

[MacMadame]

I forgot to say that Lesbian bars in the US (and probably elsewhere) have been closing since the 80s. Mostly due to demographic changes and other things. That's why the Lesbian Bar Project was started. This idea that lesbian bars are closing in droves now due to cis men pretending to be women just doesn't hold up when you look at the data.

 

[millyskate]

I don't understand what that means. Don't you agree that different parts of the world have different approaches ranging from outright hostility to acceptance and access to decent medical care?


Trans athletes have been allowed in competition at the Olympics since 2001. That's 21 years, two decades. Don't you think, if this was going to happen, it would have already happened?


I asked who is telling 8-year-olds they are oppressors.


The judge also said that it's not clear how prevalent this problem is. IOW, it could have been a one-off.

Some people believe Black people are inherently violent. If a Black woman had sexually assaulted a prisoner, would people be saying they shouldn't be in the same prison as white women? The people who believe that Black people are violent might.

Some people suck and they suck regardless of their gender, their sex, their religion, and a host of other attributes. But people will generalize especially when it suits their argument


I suspect that isn't true. And, sure enough, a simple Google search shows that it has been studied and continues to be studied.


In patriarchal societies, it's used by the patriarchy to keep people in their place. But in societies that are accepting of differences in gender expression, it is not. Some indigenous tribes recognized more than two genders, for example, and others didn't really think about people in terms of gender at all (until they were colonized). So gender wasn't used to buttress the existing power structure there.


Did you mean to say "gender"? Because anatomy is sex and I don't know any trans person who denies that. They just believe that gender is more than anatomy.


To be clear, this is a name that TERFs came up with to label themselves. It's not something other people made up to insult them.

You had dismissed Asli's assertion that children could access puberty blockers easily as untrue by citing the US situation and generalising it. But Asli wasn't speaking about the US. Her assertion was not untrue, situations across the world matter just as much as that of the US.

Regarding offending rates, the limited research available to date points to female transgender populations following male patterns of offending. I didn't want to refer to it as fact because if one digs deeper, it's quite heavily challenged and lacks detail.


We are not talking here about believing a certain population is inherently dangerous. It's about acknowledging that failure to implement sensible safeguards leads to criminal abuse of the rules rather than trying to claim there is no correlation between a change in rules and increased risks to women.


I'm a person who is paid to anticipate the long term problems caused by short-term decisions and take mitigating steps upfront to avoid those problems. It's the way my brain works and it's reflected in my perception of this situation.

I appreciate that people feel passionately about this question because the lives of real people are at stake here, loved ones.

 

[overedge]

Fundamentally I think a lot of the conflict on this subject comes from people defending transpeople by pitting them against cis-gender women and acting from a conviction that if cisgender women's concerns are allowed to be heard and considered it will harm transpeople.

I think this is really wrong headed and there is a real need for people to stop denying that all women and therefore cis-gender women experience oppression and need to be supported and heard even when they are wrong about things; if people would listen to the women who feel they are being denied agency here those women might also listen to how in fact trans rights do not threaten them.

I hear a lot of misogyny and denial of the entire history of women's oppression in the arguments people are making here. Sit down and shut up is certainly what women have always heard; bear the burden required of you for the sake of others, accept that your voice is not the one that should rise above. Even when it is other women who are implying this it is still a case of people being told that as women they do not have standing on this subject.

I agree with BR. I don't have any problem whatsoever with trans women being women. But the reality is that trans women and cisgender women grew up having different experiences and in different contexts, because of their physical sex and because of their gender identity (internal or externally perceived). It isn't a hierarchy of experiences or contexts, like one was more oppressive than the other, but there are undeniable differences. And yes, there are people on both the right and the left who want to weaponize that situation. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

 

[Asli]

Did you mean to say "gender"? Because anatomy is sex and I don't know any trans person who denies that. They just believe that gender is more than anatomy.

This is actually the main debate. The people you call TERF are the ones who say that sex is real and immutable and that sex matters. Trans activists don't say "gender is more than anatomy". They say that gender is independent of sex. According to the gender of a person, a penis can be considered female genital organ.

To be clear, this is a name that TERFs came up with to label themselves. It's not something other people made up to insult them.

AFAIK the term TERF was coined by the Australian blogger Viv Smyth, as a pejorative term. Most women find it insulting, although some radical feminists have now started merrily using it for themselves in the same way as Turkish protestors in 2013 were happily using the word "ragtag" which was how the prime minister had described them.

Whether radical feminists actually exclude transgender people in their feminism or not, depends on country. In France they are inclusive of trans men whom they consider as still being oppressed by the patriarchy because of their female biology, but exclude trans women whom they consider having enjoyed male privilege up to a certain age. In my home country Turkey, the theory is the same but in practice trans women enjoy great sympathy from not only radical feminists but all women, because we are all in the same boat, which is a very dangerous, very uncomfortable inflatable boat sailing in a stormy sea without any life jackets.

 

[MsZem]

AFAIK the term TERF was coined by the Australian blogger Viv Smyth, as a pejorative term.

Smythe wrote about this a few years ago:

I'm credited with having coined the word 'Terf'. Here's how it happened | Viv Smythe

I have no control over how others use a word that came about simply to save typing a phrase out over and over again

www.theguardian.com

 

[Asli]

You had dismissed Asli's assertion that children could access puberty blockers easily as untrue by citing the US situation and generalising it. But Asli wasn't speaking about the US. Her assertion was not untrue, situations across the world matter just as much as that of the US.

Indeed, the particular links that I gave in that post were to a Swedish documentary. This was interesting because that documentary resulted in the suspension of puberty blockers for transgender minors in Sweden. I usually follow the BBC, so know some issues about Tavistock as well, but I don't know anything about the process in the USA.

I'll copy the links here once more. They have talked with several doctors in Sweden's gender clinic. We implicitly trust doctors and think they know what they are doing. In this case, by their own admission, they don't. Everyone is well-intentioned. They are just in unchartered waters and some of the teenagers are feeling betrayed.

The politicians OTOH are absolutely clueless. Those poor children!

Here is a link of this documentary "Trans Train" Episode 1 , Episode 2 and a short Episode 3 with English subtitles.

 

[Flake99]

I know that the gender self-identification doctrine is now being taught as if it were a fact. However, it is only a doctrine that has become popular recently.

The self-id doctrine is a transphobic misconception originating in the UK and closely aligned with the same rhetoric that implies trans people are likely to commit violent assault or transition on a whim for potential athletic success (no surprise these have been mentioned in this thread). Self-id does not take into account the nuanced issues of hormone replacement therapy and presentation that are unique to every trans person's journey, which is just one clue that it doesn't represent any ideology actually preached or practiced in the trans community. There might be uneducated young trans people who are running as far and fast with their ideas as they can, but using that as a means to homogenize and/or demonize all trans people is unacceptable.

MacMadame has made a lot of valuable arguments above and I hope people who are feeling triggered or otherwise hurt by the majority of the posts in this thread find solace in that. I also want to point out that it's possible that people who are reading this website and struggling with their gender identity could be triggered or traumatized by this thread. As a skating fan who cares about trans rights for a variety of personal reasons I am choosing to remain personal (at least for now), that's why I felt obligated to join and post.

I want to add that it's deeply and depressingly ironic that, after dozens of post implying trans women's mere existence was threatening and destructive, some of the same posters had the gall to argue that trans women should be accepted in athletics.

 

[bladesofgorey]

Yelling transphobic at every attempt to discuss or debate is bullying. I don’t accept it anymore than I accept that every criticism of Israel means the critic is antisemitic or that every criticism of white Christian nationalism is anti-Christian. There are legitimate issues to be discussed from a baseline of respect for everyone’s rights.

None of these things is like the other. None of these three things are the same. The only way this would be the same since you are talking about trans people and whether or not identifying as trans and transitioning to a gender not assigned at birth is valid or if it's going to undermine feminism (?!) is more akin to saying I don’t accept it anymore than I accept that every criticism of the Jews means the critic is antisemitic. We are not talking about powerful nation states or fascist religions here. We are talking about actual human beings here, human beings who read these debates on the validity of their very selves; it's pretty apparent who's the bully. I cannot begin to imagine how my trans friends feel reading about how they will drag us back into the dark ages, take rights away from lesbian and gay men, codify gender roles, oppress biological woman, and generally be an evil blight on progressive society. Are y'all eager to have debates about intelligence levels of various ethnicities too, or their criminal tendencies or head shapes or whatever is next, you know, for the important sociological impacts or whatever bullshit the fascists have managed to get you to latch on to? Because that's where this goes and I'm appalled at the things I have been reading here. I thought better of some of you.

 

[Pink Cats]

None of these things is like the other. None of these three things are the same. The only way this would be the same since you are talking about trans people and whether or not identifying as trans and transitioning to a gender not assigned at birth is valid or if it's going to undermine feminism (?!) is more akin to saying I don’t accept it anymore than I accept that every criticism of the Jews means the critic is antisemitic. We are not talking about powerful nation states or fascist religions here. We are talking about actual human beings here, human beings who read these debates on the validity of their very selves; it's pretty apparent who's the bully. I cannot begin to imagine how my trans friends feel reading about how they will drag us back into the dark ages, take rights away from lesbian and gay men, codify gender roles, oppress biological woman, and generally be an evil blight on progressive society. Are y'all eager to have debates about intelligence levels of various ethnicities too, or their criminal tendencies or head shapes or whatever is next, you know, for the important sociological impacts or whatever bullshit the fascists have managed to get you to latch on to? Because that's where this goes and I'm appalled at the things I have been reading here. I thought better of some of you.

Well, I would say you are the one doing the bullying because you have just stated that it is not acceptable for people who are both Females and Women to discuss what it means to be a woman and how female biology affects that.

 

[millyskate]

I am sorry so many people are hurt. I'm sorry @allezfred you've been experiencing increased verbal violence and sorry for all those who feel alienated by the wider conversation and this thread more specifically.

@MacMadame you have convinced me on one point: that since the door has been open to transgender athletes for some time, and in Olympic sport we have not witnessed abusive regimes pressuring athletes to transition yet ,- it may not happen.

I do believe that the implementation of certain policies in the UK specifically has been so poor that they have served noone, and actively invited abuse of the system by criminal minds - abuse which has hopefully not been occurring on the same scale elsewhere. I'm sorry I raised it as clearly it was a red herring in this conversation.

 

[A.H.Black]

I haven't read the whole thread and am not well educated on the subject. I have a question. Would competitions where transgender women competed against other transgender women be an option? Right now I'm thinking about swimming as it is front and center. I guess I'm really thinking about sports that measure speed and strength.

 

[MacMadame]

I haven't read the whole thread and am not well educated on the subject. I have a question. Would competitions where transgender women competed against other transgender women be an option? Right now I'm thinking about swimming as it is front and center. I guess I'm really thinking about sports that measure speed and strength.

There are about 3 trans women in swimming in the US at an Elite level AFAIK. This is why (a) trans women competing in sports is not a big problem killing women's sports IMO and (b) creating a transgender category isn't really practical.

 

[MsZem]

I wonder if this is something that can be appealed to CAS, or via the regular legal system somewhere.

Fina bans trans swimmers from women's elite events

Fina, swimming's world governing body, votes to stop transgender athletes from competing in women's elite races if they have gone through any part of the process of male puberty.

www.bbc.com

 

[Asli]

None of these things is like the other. None of these three things are the same. The only way this would be the same since you are talking about trans people and whether or not identifying as trans and transitioning to a gender not assigned at birth is valid or if it's going to undermine feminism (?!) is more akin to saying I don’t accept it anymore than I accept that every criticism of the Jews means the critic is antisemitic. We are not talking about powerful nation states or fascist religions here. We are talking about actual human beings here, human beings who read these debates on the validity of their very selves; it's pretty apparent who's the bully. I cannot begin to imagine how my trans friends feel reading about how they will drag us back into the dark ages, take rights away from lesbian and gay men, codify gender roles, oppress biological woman, and generally be an evil blight on progressive society. Are y'all eager to have debates about intelligence levels of various ethnicities too, or their criminal tendencies or head shapes or whatever is next, you know, for the important sociological impacts or whatever bullshit the fascists have managed to get you to latch on to? Because that's where this goes and I'm appalled at the things I have been reading here. I thought better of some of you.

This entire post is a misunderstanding or misrepresentation.

 

[Flake99]

This entire post is a misunderstanding or misrepresentation.

Why? While succinct, I found bladesofgorey's post to be persuasive, insightful, relevant, and highly articulate. Certainly it deserves more than eight words which are a baseless assertion trying to discredit it.

What I read in the middle of this thread is several pages of anti-trans talking points and discourse masquerading as "enlightened" or "civilized" discussion. Imagine a room full of white people discussing how Black people are existentially threatening or less interested in their children's education than white people or less likely to experience physical pain than white people. Except you don't have to imagine that because a quick google search will show you those are all things that have not only been discussed, but people have dedicated time and money and energy to theorize pseudoscience justifying their racist claims.

Transphobia is obviously different than racism, but, again, I ask anyone who cares to imagine trans people reading a thread where people are casually making claims like the following ones:
-Trans women regularly commit violent crimes agains cis women while in prison (which begs so many question I don't even know where to start--does this imply that people transition or claim to be trans because they'll be able to victimize cis women if they wind up in jail? Does this happen right before they go to jail or is it an advanced strategy just in case someone wind up going to prison?)
-There's some progressive brainwashing program aimed at vilifying cis women and perhaps especially cis lesbian women from a young age for being an inherent threat to trans progress
-The mere existence of trans people creates some sort of radical redefinition of gender and/or sexuality that ruins lives and makes people unable to breathe
-Oppressive regimes will force people to transition for a chance at athletic glory

There are many more implicit arguments, like ones about puberty blockers which either suggest or rely on evidence designed to create a moral panic based on fear that trans people who transition before puberty will be more dangerous because they might be more likely to pass as trans and therefore we won't even know if the scores of people invading female spaces are actually cis or trans and people will wind up kissing or, god forbid, being placed in sexual situations with people who might not be cis and the cis people won't be aware of that. And, additionally, many of the claims being thrown around here assume that people who want to transition have the money/resources to demand puberty blockers and thousands of dollars of surgery which ignores classism, racism, and various other biases that intersect with transphobia.

I'm familiar enough with figure skating in North America to know that the community is filled with a fair amount of conservative and even prejudicial people, but recently more trans and nonbinary voices have been rising in competitive skating, skating media, and of course skating fans. That's why I took the time to speak out after discovering this extremely upsetting discussion, and I can guarantee that trans people have read this whole thread, been upset by it, been triggered by it, and most likely feel more afraid to speak out in spaces like this because of it. And anyone saying "I'm sorry if someone's feelings got hurt" . . . I don't think that's really going to undo any damage.

 

[Asli]

How great is the risk of a woman in a prison or hospital being attacked by a transgender woman versus the risk of a woman being attacked by a man in a prison or hospital (or her own home)? Bearing in mind that in Ireland and I am guessing the UK is similar transgender people (men/women) represent 0.0something percent of the population?

I think this debate should only include prisons, which are controlled environments. I agree with you that statistically more women are at risk at home from violent husbands or parents or even "friends".

If I understand correctly, there are two different groups of transgender women in prison.

1. Ordinary trans women already living as such before being arrested and are serving a sentence for some random crime. They don't even appear in the statistics because they already have a gender recognition certificate. As you say their number must be small.

2. Prisoners who apply to be considered transgender after being arrested or convicted, so they currently have a case conference. The BBC's "reality check team" verified the claim by a feminist organisation that 41% of this category are serving time for sexual offenses.

In 2018, in England and Wales, there were 125 transgender prisoners in category 2.
60 were serving time for sexual offences, including 27 for rape, 5 for attempted rape and 13 for sexual assault/attempted sexual assault. Therefore 40%.

I'm not going to enumerate the crimes against children here, since there aren't children in the women's prison and I don't want to throw up.

They don't say which gender the transgender people are, but in the UK "rape" is only penetrative, therefore biological women are hardly ever convicted for the rape of an adult.

This is of course both alarming and eyebrow-raising. 40% of those transgender prisoners are serving time for sexual offenses and either they are already in women's prisons or they are in a process that could end up putting them there. (The MoJ doesn't give information either way.)

This is compared to around 19% of sexual offenses for male prisoners and around 3% for female prisoners.

Personally, I don't believe for a minute that transgender women commit this much rape. IMO rapists pretend to be trans women to have an easy time in prison or to find new victims.

Convicted rapists and dangerous murderers shouldn't be put into women's prison's, to sleep in a cell and share the showers with women whose majority come from backgrounds of abuse. Period. Some incredible examples are happening in the USA as well as the UK and the judges, somehow, are deaf to the pleas of the women.

 

[Asli]

I just want to add, @allezfred, that even in the case of trans women who won't harm anyone in prison, it may be difficult for most women's prison inmates to share a cell or a shower with a person with a male body. Most inmates come from backgrounds of physical abuse by men. They are traumatised.

Maybe the solution is to have a different section for trans women, in order to guarantee the safety and sanity of all prisoners.

 

[PRlady]

Does anyone else find it peculiar that two brand new members who have never posted before parachuted into this thread with extremely strong and defensive posts?

When that happens in a skating thread, it’s often a skater’s friend or family member. I’m wondering what the mechanism is here.

(And for my former employer’s sake, happy I can’t be mysteriously doxxed again by hate notes sent to my boss because of posts on this subject two years ago. People certainly seem to keep a close eye on this topic, don’t they.)

 

[Trillian]

That's why I took the time to speak out after discovering this extremely upsetting discussion, and I can guarantee that trans people have read this whole thread, been upset by it, been triggered by it, and most likely feel more afraid to speak out in spaces like this because of it.

I agree with this. And as someone who also has a personal interest in intersex issues, I’ve consistently found these discussions upsetting to read from that perspective. While intersex people aren’t being directly attacked in the same way that trans people are, there is a real callousness to the way people dismiss their existence as an exception not even worth discussing. Statistically, there are even more intersex people than trans people in the world, but the “biological sex” crowd prefers to erase them from the conversation because it’s more convenient that way.

If people genuinely want to advance women’s sports, there are endless real, substantial issues we could address that have absolutely nothing to do with a very small number of trans women who participate with varying degrees of success.

 

[barbk]

If people genuinely want to advance women’s sports, there are endless real, substantial issues we could address that have absolutely nothing to do with a very small number of trans women who participate with varying degrees of success.

I'm old enough to remember the pre-Title 9 days when school-age women had minimal opportunities to participate in competitive sports in school settings. My memory is that my high school offered girl's basketball (with the awful half-court rules), field hockey, and gymnastics. The high school I attended beginning in junior year had swimming, tennis, and track. At both schools, girls had to raise money for uniforms and transportation, while the boys' teams had uniforms that were provided by the school. (Swimmers might have had to buy their own swimsuits, but the guys got warmups from the school.) Coaches for girls' teams either didn't get stipends or received smaller stipends than did the coaches of the boys' teams.

I have raised money for legal expenses of women challenging Title 9 violations (many of which were sports related) in higher education and spoken in support of equitable sports funding allocation for young women in our local high schools. I think that qualifies as genuinely wanting (and working) to advance women's sports.

The situation with trans women competing in higher levels of sports competition seems similar to the issues of disabled athletes competing with prosthetics. At what point does a prosthetic yield an unfair advantage?

 

[millyskate]

Transphobia is obviously different than racism, but, again, I ask anyone who cares to imagine trans people reading a thread where people are casually making claims like the following ones:
-Trans women regularly commit violent crimes agains cis women while in prison (which begs so many question I don't even know where to start--does this imply that people transition or claim to be trans because they'll be able to victimize cis women if they wind up in jail? Does this happen right before they go to jail or is it an advanced strategy just in case someone wind up going to prison?)
-

Just to put two particular points to rest:

- no, the specific contention never was that transgender people are the ones committing the crimes. It's that male criminals are taking advantage of the legislation in place in the UK to access women's prisons and hospitals to commit more crimes. I thought this was clear, sorry it was not

This in the UK requires no forward planning as the request can be made upon arrest or at any time even after the initial incarceration. There is fairly substantial evidence that abuse of the system is occurring quite frequently. I believe that a revision of the system providing additional safeguards would benefit everyone including trans inmates.

- again, this thread is non US specific. In most countries, the treatments are provided free of charge by the relevant national health services so the argument about resources is misguided regarding posters' intentions.

 

[Flake99]

I agree with this. And as someone who also has a personal interest in intersex issues, I’ve consistently found these discussions upsetting to read from that perspective. While intersex people aren’t being directly attacked in the same way that trans people are, there is a real callousness to the way people dismiss their existence as an exception not even worth discussing. Statistically, there are even more intersex people than trans people in the world, but the “biological sex” crowd prefers to erase them from the conversation because it’s more convenient that way.

If people genuinely want to advance women’s sports, there are endless real, substantial issues we could address that have absolutely nothing to do with a very small number of trans women who participate with varying degrees of success.

I agree with all of this as well. I also want to thank you for advancing the discussion instead of questioning my existence as a new poster. Speaking of which . . .

Does anyone else find it peculiar that two brand new members who have never posted before parachuted into this thread with extremely strong and defensive posts?

When that happens in a skating thread, it’s often a skater’s friend or family member. I’m wondering what the mechanism is here.

(And for my former employer’s sake, happy I can’t be mysteriously doxxed again by hate notes sent to my boss because of posts on this subject two years ago. People certainly seem to keep a close eye on this topic, don’t they.)

I'm not sure who the second new member is and I'm also not sure why it's "defensive" to want to speak up for trans people in the face of multiple threads of posts disparaging them. However, you may consider that it's quite likely there are skaters, parents of skaters, and relatives of skaters who are either themselves trans or nonbinary, or have relatives who are, who enjoy reading FSU for information about skating. Anyone in any of those categories would naturally be invested in the issue in this thread and might feel more passionately about supporting others in similar positions from reading posts that negate their experiences and question the validity of their existence. By claiming my posts here are "defensive" and "peculiar" and the result of some sort of "mechanism," you seen to imply you are in a position that allows you to interrogate the validity of those whose experiences and perspectives are incompatible with your own, which mirrors many of your posts about trans people in this thread.

Just to put two particular points to rest:

- no, the specific contention never was that transgender people are the ones committing the crimes. It's that male criminals are taking advantage of the legislation in place in the UK to access women's prisons and hospitals to commit more crimes. I thought this was clear, sorry it was not

This in the UK requires no forward planning as the request can be made upon arrest or at any time even after the initial incarceration. There is fairly substantial evidence that abuse of the system is occurring quite frequently. I believe that a revision of the system providing additional safeguards would benefit everyone including trans inmates.

- again, this thread is non US specific. In most countries, the treatments are provided free of charge by the relevant national health services so the argument about resources is misguided regarding posters' intentions.

I apologize for misconstruing your arguments, and thank you for clarifying them. I still find it puzzling that, in the context of a thread that devolved into transphobic talking points (including those from the Daily Mail, of all sources), you decided to mention how people who are not trans harm other people who are not trans, when there are multitudes of evidence that trans people are likely to be in extreme risk of physical harm when in prison, to name only one example that highlights trans vulnerability and lack of legal protection (and that's in the UK, the U.S., and many other places). Again, a quick google search will provide lots of evidence supporting that.

 

[Trillian]

I have raised money for legal expenses of women challenging Title 9 violations (many of which were sports related) in higher education and spoken in support of equitable sports funding allocation for young women in our local high schools. I think that qualifies as genuinely wanting (and working) to advance women's sports.

I agree, and I appreciate and respect that work. But that was my point. There are things that actually do have a meaningful impact for women in sports, and if we’re going to see public discourse about how to make sports more equitable for women, I’d rather it focus on things like this that actually matter.

The situation with trans women competing in higher levels of sports competition seems similar to the issues of disabled athletes competing with prosthetics. At what point does a prosthetic yield an unfair advantage?

I honestly have no idea. At what point? How often does this come up? Who’s been harmed by the participation of athletes with prosthetics, and what form does that harm take? Lots of athletes have advantages over other athletes for various reasons, so which advantages are fair and which ones are unfair? Why?

I honestly don’t know how much energy I have for this conversation in this context. I would just ask people to consider that ways that gatekeeping around “biological sex” impacts everyone, not just trans women. There will be cis girls who swim too fast and don’t conform to gender stereotypes who will have to “prove” that they’re “real” women. Intersex people have a fraught history in women’s sports, period, and that’s not going to improve now. These policies that are supposed to make things more “fair” for cis women can be used against any of us.

 

[millyskate]

I apologize for misconstruing your arguments, and thank you for clarifying them. I still find it puzzling that, in the context of a thread that devolved into transphobic talking points (including those from the Daily Mail, of all sources), you decided to mention how people who are not trans harm other people who are not trans, when there are multitudes of evidence that trans people are likely to be in extreme risk of physical harm when in prison, to name only one example that highlights trans vulnerability and lack of legal protection (and that's in the UK, the U.S., and many other places). Again, a quick google search will provide lots of evidence supporting that.

Thanks for listening.

I was initially triggered to join the thread by two posts.
One was suggesting that anyone voicing concern that men would pretend to be trans to access women's spaces was inherently transphobic and/or was a pretext as it was unlikely to happen in real life, which I found to be a really upsetting and untrue assertion.
Hence why I wanted to illustrate that it is happening, on a non negligeable scale, when poorly considered policies are introduced. And that the women worried about it aren't using it as a pretext for transphobia, they are genuine.
My motivation in mentioning the lack of conclusive data regarding offending patterns was actually to illustrate the scale of the potential fraud casting unfair assumptions on the transgender population - but I formulated it poorly and then dug myself into a hole there.


The second one was a rebuttal of Asli's post that treatments were being handed out to children too easily by saying they were really hard to access in the US. Again it felt unfair to label those concerns as transphobic, as in several European countries the concern is valid - in the UK disproportionately affecting children who were brought up in care who have no financial resources at all, so the presumption that only people with support, determination and finances could access the treatment felt particularly off-base.


On the positive side, lessons in the UK are already being learnt from initial mistakes and a special prison unit with individual cells fitted with toilets and showers has been built for, amongst others, transgender inmates to be housed. That's a win for everyone and hopefully all inmates will in time benefit from these improved conditions.

 

[allezfred]

I think this debate should only include prisons, which are controlled environments. I agree with you that statistically more women are at risk at home from violent husbands or parents or even "friends".

If I understand correctly, there are two different groups of transgender women in prison.

1. Ordinary trans women already living as such before being arrested and are serving a sentence for some random crime. They don't even appear in the statistics because they already have a gender recognition certificate. As you say their number must be small.

2. Prisoners who apply to be considered transgender after being arrested or convicted, so they currently have a case conference. The BBC's "reality check team" verified the claim by a feminist organisation that 41% of this category are serving time for sexual offenses.

In 2018, in England and Wales, there were 125 transgender prisoners in category 2.
60 were serving time for sexual offences, including 27 for rape, 5 for attempted rape and 13 for sexual assault/attempted sexual assault. Therefore 40%.

I'm not going to enumerate the crimes against children here, since there aren't children in the women's prison and I don't want to throw up.

They don't say which gender the transgender people are, but in the UK "rape" is only penetrative, therefore biological women are hardly ever convicted for the rape of an adult.

This is of course both alarming and eyebrow-raising. 40% of those transgender prisoners are serving time for sexual offenses and either they are already in women's prisons or they are in a process that could end up putting them there. (The MoJ doesn't give information either way.)

This is compared to around 19% of sexual offenses for male prisoners and around 3% for female prisoners.

Personally, I don't believe for a minute that transgender women commit this much rape. IMO rapists pretend to be trans women to have an easy time in prison or to find new victims.

Convicted rapists and dangerous murderers shouldn't be put into women's prison's, to sleep in a cell and share the showers with women whose majority come from backgrounds of abuse. Period. Some incredible examples are happening in the USA as well as the UK and the judges, somehow, are deaf to the pleas of the women.

I just want to add, @allezfred, that even in the case of trans women who won't harm anyone in prison, it may be difficult for most women's prison inmates to share a cell or a shower with a person with a male body. Most inmates come from backgrounds of physical abuse by men. They are traumatised.

Maybe the solution is to have a different section for trans women, in order to guarantee the safety and sanity of all prisoners.

To be honest, when I read this the major problem I see is how inhumanly we treat people who are incarcerated. People shouldn’t be put in vulnerable positions where they are sharing cells or showers with potentially violent people.

Again I would ask - why are we being whipped up into talking about such rare cases involving transgender people (and mostly women) when the overwhelming amount of violence committed against (cisgender and transgender) women is by (cisgender) men?

 

[antmanb]

The second one was a rebuttal of Asli's post that treatments were being handed out to children too easily by saying they were really hard to access in the US. Again it felt unfair to label those concerns as transphobic, as in several European countries the concern is valid - in the UK disproportionately affecting children who were brought up in care who have no financial resources at all, so the presumption that only people with support, determination and finances could access the treatment felt particularly off-base.

I don't know how or where children in the UK are supposedly getting treatment easily because I have a friend of a friend whose child who was born a girl hit puberty started having periods and was triggered enough to start a conversation with their parents about being trans. Following several trips to the GP and doing their own research there are only two (possibly three) clinics in the UK (out of a total of 7) that deal with under 18s. There is a four year waiting list so the child will actually be 18 by the time they can be seen. No chance of getting puberty blockers or anything at all in that time. Even if they had the money to do any of it privately, the waiting time is still 2 years.

I know it's completely anecdotal, but Mr Antmanb has two clients that work for trans charities who say 3-4 years is the average wait time for kids who come out as trans. Another problem recently has been that GPs are saying - live in the "new" gender for a year before even being put on the waiting list for a clinic so it can add an extra year.

The parents of the kid i mentioned above are seriously concerned for their mental health and have genuine concerns about suicide.

 

[allezfred]

The “debate” about transgender rights is not happening in a vacuum.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/06/17/lgbtq-pride-violence/

Analysts draw a direct link from hateful political speech to attacks on the ground. The ACLED report notes that the rise in violence comes as “right-wing politicians and media outlets have mainstreamed the use of increasingly inflammatory rhetoric against the LGBT+ community.”
Trans people have been particularly targeted. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group, says the past year saw record violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Women of color, especially Black trans women, were the most frequent targets.

Transgender women are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.