Yeah, the implication being that white Christians making white-only churches in the name of Christianity would be pretty offensive, and by analogy cis women making their own women's spaces that specifically exclude trans women in the name of ~feminism is offensive.
Why doesn't that sound great? Why shouldn't everyone be able to have places for themselves? This is more or less the entire premise of private property.
This argument goes right to its ultimate logical conclusions so fast its unbelievable: From the question I just asked it can be presumed I'm 100% fine with discrimination at scale in society. I am not. And yet, should the federal government be allowed to create women's shelters? Or men's bathrooms? Or urinals which are explicitly discriminatory based on your biology? Of course.
Some nuance has to come back to the conversation around discrimination. Honestly, it seems rather simple to me, although I always hold my breath and wait for someone to call me a horrible person: discrimination should be legal, and we should also lampoon and publicly mock bad and stupid discrimination.
If we aren't allowed to mock anything, if we all need to respect each other, then we _need_ anti-discrimination laws. I'd fight for anyone's right to deny anyone else access to their home. I'd still think they're a huge jerk for not being nice to their neighbors.
Wtf is this? As a White Christian (living as both a racial and religious minority in my country of residence btw) this is extremely offensive. I have the right to assemble with other people on the identity feature I want, especially on the internet. I bet wouldn't dare to say the same kind of things about Judaism because you know exactly how racist and discriminatory it is.
Is that really a good example? I used to live really close to a church that was clearly for Black Pentecostal Christians (White attendees would be accused of appropriation by nearly everyone), and there's a Korean Baptist church that doesn't even do their sermons in English!
Nobody has an issue with either of these churches that have such specific audiences, so focusing on White Christians to demonstrate your point probably falls a little flat.
Are there White specific churches? Mennonite churches probably could be classified this way, but it's not because of racial segregation. Comparing any of this to gender just doesn't make sense.
Could be easier to ensure that any space is safe to any human being instead of creating new ones to women? I'm not asking rhetorically. I genuinely don't know what kind of spaces are not safe only for women and what could make those space safer for them.
> No worries about it excluding women of color, either? Racism and transphobia are just political opinions, right? Human rights are so last millenium.
Free association is about being able to decide (which is to say, make a choice by discrimination) about who to associate with. Conflating the legal concept of discrimination and the right to discriminate via the biological function of the senses, does not help things.
It seems clear to me that this platform would have no problem letting on women of color. They unfortunately chose an imperfect solution to validate new members which they had to resort to due to the women on their site being threatened.
It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose facial bone structures are unacceptable to the app.
It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose skin color is unacceptable to the app.
It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose biological sex at birth is unacceptable to the app.
None of these criteria have any bearing whatsoever on gender. They’re saying “women” out loud, but what they’re trying to filter for in practice is “people who were sexed female-only at birth and meet a restrictive set of facial characteristics”. Women have a variety of biological sexes at birth (male, female, both, neither). Women have a variety of facial characteristics (feminine, masculine, androgynous, mixed). So it’s news that they’re trying to discriminate by redefining “women” to exclude some women.
No, that's not the story. The story is that there is a social network for women who have excluded non-women. They have done this because on many occasions, biological males have joined their platform and have threatened their users.
They have chosen an imperfect solution to validate that their users are who they say they are, sure, but they have resorted to this measure to try to keep this space as their own.
We’ll see. The imperfection of their solution is certainly the surface story, but I suspect it’s meant to be a haven for TERF hate speech (not just a haven for all women) and won’t survive.
If that space defined “trans women” as only those who have completed both facial feminization surgery (with AI evaluation of their face bones) and required that they have completed vaginoplasty or vulvoplasty so that their genitals are sexed female, then no, it would be just as discriminatory to trans women as the app under discussion here is being to all women.
If this imaginary trans women space accepted all serious forms of presurgical or partial-surgical proof, such as a doctor’s letter or a hormone prescription or an orchiectomy or etc, then that would not be discriminatory and would be fine.
The core issue here is that this app is trying to enforce gender as purely a function of physical characteristics, denying altogether that gender is more complicated than that and is not guaranteed to be linked to any physical characteristics whatsoever. Their ”women only” definitions fail the transgender women test, the intersex test, and the “born female-sex athletes with high testosterone and masculine facial features” test.
Either they are blithely unaware of these complications, or they are unconcerned with them. That is, itself, newsworthy.
For-profit ventures aren't allowed to deny service based on immutable characteristics in any country with these anti-discrimination laws, except for very narrow exceptions. This is doubly so for a service that provides networking opportunities to find contacts for businesses and jobs.
Its interesting to see the parallels between this and the subreddit r/blackpeopletwitter, which began requiring users to verify with mods that they pass the "paper bag test" in order to participate on the forum. Even the rationality for doing so sounds exactly like this quote from the article regarding Giggle, simply replacing "black people" with "women":
> "We wanted a place where women could go to help each other," she said in an email. "A female space, in the palm of their hand. Where women could find support, connection and a refuge amongst other women no matter where they were or what they were doing."
And yet the reaction to the two seems to be divergent. We've clearly stopped caring for eliminating discrimination and now are hellbent on fostering discrimination, so long as its discriminating against the "right" groups. Hard to keep up with what groups are "right" to discriminate against on any particular day, though. Seems like a race to the bottom to me.
Ending discrimination is great, but that's not happening today. And today, people need to cope with discrimination. Which sometimes means singling out people who are discriminated against, using the same criteria that the discriminators use.
Trans women face discrimination in many of the same ways that cis women do, and in most circumstances it's best to simply treat them as women. There are a somewhat-nebulous set of cases that should be restricted to cis women, but much of the time those cases are more about anti-trans-discrimination than actually protecting cis women in particular.
Any case of discrimination for the benefit of marginalized groups is going to invite scrutiny, and sometimes legitimate disagreement. It sounds to me like this case is reasonable to exclude men, but not to exclude trans women. The fact that they don't menstruate, for example, doesn't mark them as non-women: lots of women don't menstruate (young, old, ill, athletes, anorexics, etc.) It's true that many lacked girlhoods, but increasingly many have transitioned at a young age.
That's my cursory opinion. It could change if I were exposed to more details.
But I don't consider it helpful to say "to end discrimination we should stop letting people self-segregate". That attitude fosters abuse by people who discriminate, and forbids people from protecting themselves against it. Maybe in the future it will be helpful, but today it harms a lot of people.
I know saying the transphobic word is meant to shut down the conversation, but it really doesn't because people like me don't own it. Seeing a difference between trans women and women is a nod to reality, not hate
No, I’m not trying to shut down the ‘conversation’. I’m just saying, you should try to figure out if you actually have a good reason for feeling that way.
I have checked in with myself and don't hate transwomen and am not transphobic. I just don't think a transwoman should be flashing their penis in a changing room when women without penises object
The simple presence of a penis attached to a woman in a women’s changing room does not imply in any way that a person is behaving inappropriately, any more than it does when attached to a man in a men’s changing room, or an androgynous person in either. Taking offense at someone’s unaroused body in a changing room, when they’re keeping to themselves and changing, however, is a severe violation of social protocol in many cultures.
Some intersex people have two sets of genitalia, one for each changing room; they must use one or the other, as only the two options are offered in the vast majority of cases. If they are intersex women, then those around them may be made uncomfortable by their body’s physical features. It is everyone else’s responsibility to deal with that discomfort and let them finish changing without comment, same as they would expect to be left alone about their own physical features while changing.
If a person is behaving inappropriately in a changing room, such as staring at the sexual features of many others, or making rude gestures towards or uninvited comments about physical features, then they should be asked to stop or leave and may be subject to punishment by the business and/or local authorities for their behavior — no matter what their own genitalia are, whether they’re a match for the gender label (if any) on the door of the changing room or not.
While I'm sympathetic to transwomen in general, cases like this really bother me. It just feels like this person is not mentally well. I am sympathetic to the concerns of women as well, as we all should be.
EXCLUSIVE: 'We're uncomfortable in our own locker room.' Lia Thomas' UPenn teammate tells how the trans swimmer doesn't always cover up her male genitals when changing and their concerns go ignored by their coach
How exactly do you determine who is a woman though? Because appearances alone don't cut it, and the more you pick things apart, the less you can make any hard lines. Simply put, trans women are women.
If the people running the app were determined to screen reliably they would have to require documentation, because anyone can submit any real or synthetic photograph.
You’re mistaken about the lack of “hard lines” distinguishing the sexes, though. The difference between male and female is unambiguous in biology. “Trans women” are, by definition, not women.
> The difference between male and female is unambiguous in biology. “Trans women” are, by definition, not women.
That is emphatically false. There are innumerable biological differences between men as a whole and women as a whole, and while these different factors largely correlate, they do not necessarily fit neatly into one box or the other. Is an XXY individual with a penis but undescended testes and low levels of blood testosterone and few androgen receptors "biologically" male or female? What about an XX individual with ambiguous external genitalia, high circulating testosterone, and a high number of androgen receptors? What do you make of the fact that females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia are far more likely to identify as LGBT? You are oversimplifying the biology.
That said, the right to create an exclusive space is a fundamental constitutional right. En plus, for socially marginalized groups, it is a societal benefit for them to have a space exclusive to them. I support the creators of this social media app.
Those cases are worth considering, socially. But generally speaking, biology isn't defined by edge cases. There is a clear biological definition of sex, which a small percentage of examples do not fit into. That doesn't negate the existence of biological sex.
...And it would be equally bullshit to encounter someone missing a finger and start berating them. "You don't really have four fingers, biologically you're still five-fingered!"
It's appropriate to discuss generalities. It's appropriate to discuss individual cases. What is inappropriate is dismissing individual cases to come to a general conclusion, and then insist that it applies universally.
No it's appropriate to dismiss individual cases to come to general conclusions. We do this all the time with outliers. That's how we classify large sets of data. Classifications are very useful and should not be thrown away. That said you treat an individual as who they are not with generalizations. You don't say to a six fingered individual you're five fingered. But if you want to make gloves for a living you're going to sell more volume if you make five fingered gloves.
This is also in the context of trans people the vast majority are not biological outliers simply people identifying as something different to their unambiguous biological sex.
> the vast majority are not biological outliers simply people identifying as something different to their unambiguous biological sex
To make this claim, you would have had to find an exhaustive list of biological sex differences, and check a large representative random sample of transgender individuals to see whether all of those biological sex traits aligned "unambiguous[ly]" with their assigned birth sex.
Since I am quite confident that this work has not been done, may I suggest deferring to individual people to tell you what is going on in their bodies? While imperfect, self-reporting is still epistemologically far superior to you just pulling this claim out of your ass.
> "Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD."
Intersex people are 0.018% of the population using the precise definition (not the wishy-washy definition that has been debunked from your study). [1]
So a city of 1,000,000 people has merely 180 intersex people in it, the rest conform to their sex assigned at birth.
Seems pretty flimsy to claim a 99.99% match rate is wrong because of extreme outliers. It's like claiming the coronavirus PCR tests are worthless because of their (much higher) rate of false negatives/positives.
> (not the wishy-washy definition that has been debunked from your study). [1]
Your single study isn't a debunking. Leonard Sax is a gender activist. He's also just one person who has no degree in genetics. I provided citations of actual research institutions with actual geneticists working for them.
> Seems pretty flimsy to claim a 99.99% match rate is wrong because of extreme outliers.
I didn't claim it was wrong. I claimed it wasn't "cut-and-dry". Nothing you said refutes that. In fact, pointing out any kind of controversy on this topic proves that I was right: there is no clear, undisputed genetic test for someone's sex.
There is no clear, undisputed test for coronavirus. Does this mean testing is not effective?
Notably, testing for gender has an accuracy rate that is orders of magnitude more reliable than all conventional coronavirus tests, including multiple PCR tests back-to-back.
As for Eric Vilain, the physician who advocates for extremely harmful (UN's definition) sex assignment procedures on intersex people [1], his wishy-washy definition includes people who have minor genital deformities, according to his own paper. [2]
Just to be crystal clear to drive this point home, Vilain is an advocate of a procedure that causes "severe and life-long physical and mental pain and suffering and can amount to torture and ill-treatment" [1] and which is condemned by intersex advocacy groups. [1]
According to the UN, he is a vehement proponent of torture.
It doesn't, but your analogy of pretending you were talking to a schoolchild about 2 + 2 has nothing to do with the real world either, so I thought I'd respond in a whimsical way.
Operations engineers are engineers, just as much as other engineers. But when you’re discussing the subgroup (opseng) in specific and whether it’s a member of the overall group (engineers), it’s logical and appropriate in conversational English to refer to the subgroup by specific label, as the comment you’re replying to does.
Women can be sexed at birth as female, male, intersex, neither; women can have genes for XX, XY, XXY, etc; women can have zero or more genitalia; women can have masculine, feminine, androgynous, mixed facial bone structures.
Each of these is a valid subgroup of women which can, if necessary, be described as a subgroup. Normally, just “women” should suffice, but the app linked by this post actively excludes at least one of those subgroups from the label “women”. So it becomes necessary to discuss those subgroups by name, such as “trans women” and “black women”, in order for discourse to occur.
Generally, no; if one represents as binary gender “woman” with subgroup “trans”, it is implied and understood that they are not a member of binary gender “man”. That they are a member of subgroup “trans” is not relevant to resolving their binary gender either-or, in your example.
They might be “male at birth” or “intersex at birth” on certain medical paperwork, and those physical sex characteristic will remain unchanged in subgroup “at birth” regardless of any shift in gender or medical alterations to their present-day sex characteristics.
(To avoid any possible confusion, I’m keeping in mind that “male” is sex and “man” is gender, as this is often confused in discussion of these topics. One’s sex is a physical characteristic like one’s eye color or skin tone; most people assume that everyone has just one and that it doesn’t change, neither of which are true. One’s gender is a behavioral characteristic like accent or musical tastes; it can’t be reliably guessed from any physical characteristic, and it can change at any time, either gradually over years or all at once at a coffee shop or anywhere in between.)
You’re attempting to redefine the gender characteristic “man” in terms of physical sex characteristics “male”, which isn’t valid; this invalidity is proven by the existence of both intersex men and intersex women.
You’re also using the invalid term “biological sex” to refer to “sex at birth”, which can be male, female, or intersex — but due to your imprecise phrasing, your use could also refer to “current sex”, which is a modifiable state that can be altered surgically and thus invalidates your point further.
Minor49er, I don’t think you’re participating in good faith here. You’ve presented a view that doesn’t stand up to the facts after repeatedly being confronted with them in multiple threads, your concluding question “Don’t you agree?” is a direct quote from the sealioning comic, and you’ve asked the mods to delete this post in a different thread while continuing to engage here. You’ll need to shop your anti-trans trolling elsewhere, as it’s not productive for me to engage with you further.
I'm not redefining gender characteristics or anything of the sort. I'm genuinely curious how biological sex, which is physically based, is discarded in favor of a description of an idea of gender that only exists in the mind. "Sex at birth" implies that the biology can change after birth, which it cannot. To me, it seems that it's not in good faith to categorize "trans women" only as "women" and reject the idea that they can be categorized as "men" at all.
And yes, I asked the mods to delete the story because obviously a lot of posts have been getting flagged. The story appears to be causing a lot of strong responses either for or against Giggle, its community, and its owner. It's simply not resulting in constructive discussion. I mean, you're even accusing me of "ignoring facts" (?) and of being an "anti-trans troll".
This app has several dog-whistles for TERF hate groups, that are designed to fall just below the threshold of deniability until considered as a whole by someone familiar with TERF hate speech markers:
- Dedication to the color "pink" representing women (classical pre-birth gender roles)
- Defining the gender "women" as exclusively people who were sexed female-only at birth (assumption-by-framing discrimination vs. transgender, intersex)
- Implying that gender is permanently affixed through bone structures to each human body at birth (classical definition that gender == sex)
- Declaring that only binary genders "male" and "female" exist (inflexible binary gender roles)
So I expect that this app will end up banned for promoting hate speech as a result — not because they're attempting to create a women-only space, but because they're attempting to create a social space where TERF hate speech is welcomed and encouraged.
81 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This argument goes right to its ultimate logical conclusions so fast its unbelievable: From the question I just asked it can be presumed I'm 100% fine with discrimination at scale in society. I am not. And yet, should the federal government be allowed to create women's shelters? Or men's bathrooms? Or urinals which are explicitly discriminatory based on your biology? Of course.
Some nuance has to come back to the conversation around discrimination. Honestly, it seems rather simple to me, although I always hold my breath and wait for someone to call me a horrible person: discrimination should be legal, and we should also lampoon and publicly mock bad and stupid discrimination.
If we aren't allowed to mock anything, if we all need to respect each other, then we _need_ anti-discrimination laws. I'd fight for anyone's right to deny anyone else access to their home. I'd still think they're a huge jerk for not being nice to their neighbors.
But I love your username.
What would be better about it than where you currently live? How do non-White Christians harm your quality of life?
Nobody has an issue with either of these churches that have such specific audiences, so focusing on White Christians to demonstrate your point probably falls a little flat.
Are there White specific churches? Mennonite churches probably could be classified this way, but it's not because of racial segregation. Comparing any of this to gender just doesn't make sense.
Free association is about being able to decide (which is to say, make a choice by discrimination) about who to associate with. Conflating the legal concept of discrimination and the right to discriminate via the biological function of the senses, does not help things.
It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose skin color is unacceptable to the app.
It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose biological sex at birth is unacceptable to the app.
None of these criteria have any bearing whatsoever on gender. They’re saying “women” out loud, but what they’re trying to filter for in practice is “people who were sexed female-only at birth and meet a restrictive set of facial characteristics”. Women have a variety of biological sexes at birth (male, female, both, neither). Women have a variety of facial characteristics (feminine, masculine, androgynous, mixed). So it’s news that they’re trying to discriminate by redefining “women” to exclude some women.
They have chosen an imperfect solution to validate that their users are who they say they are, sure, but they have resorted to this measure to try to keep this space as their own.
If this imaginary trans women space accepted all serious forms of presurgical or partial-surgical proof, such as a doctor’s letter or a hormone prescription or an orchiectomy or etc, then that would not be discriminatory and would be fine.
The core issue here is that this app is trying to enforce gender as purely a function of physical characteristics, denying altogether that gender is more complicated than that and is not guaranteed to be linked to any physical characteristics whatsoever. Their ”women only” definitions fail the transgender women test, the intersex test, and the “born female-sex athletes with high testosterone and masculine facial features” test.
Either they are blithely unaware of these complications, or they are unconcerned with them. That is, itself, newsworthy.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: Seeing the state of the comment section for this submission, why not remove the article?
> "We wanted a place where women could go to help each other," she said in an email. "A female space, in the palm of their hand. Where women could find support, connection and a refuge amongst other women no matter where they were or what they were doing."
And yet the reaction to the two seems to be divergent. We've clearly stopped caring for eliminating discrimination and now are hellbent on fostering discrimination, so long as its discriminating against the "right" groups. Hard to keep up with what groups are "right" to discriminate against on any particular day, though. Seems like a race to the bottom to me.
- A Smirking Philosopher
Trans women face discrimination in many of the same ways that cis women do, and in most circumstances it's best to simply treat them as women. There are a somewhat-nebulous set of cases that should be restricted to cis women, but much of the time those cases are more about anti-trans-discrimination than actually protecting cis women in particular.
Any case of discrimination for the benefit of marginalized groups is going to invite scrutiny, and sometimes legitimate disagreement. It sounds to me like this case is reasonable to exclude men, but not to exclude trans women. The fact that they don't menstruate, for example, doesn't mark them as non-women: lots of women don't menstruate (young, old, ill, athletes, anorexics, etc.) It's true that many lacked girlhoods, but increasingly many have transitioned at a young age.
That's my cursory opinion. It could change if I were exposed to more details.
But I don't consider it helpful to say "to end discrimination we should stop letting people self-segregate". That attitude fosters abuse by people who discriminate, and forbids people from protecting themselves against it. Maybe in the future it will be helpful, but today it harms a lot of people.
Some intersex people have two sets of genitalia, one for each changing room; they must use one or the other, as only the two options are offered in the vast majority of cases. If they are intersex women, then those around them may be made uncomfortable by their body’s physical features. It is everyone else’s responsibility to deal with that discomfort and let them finish changing without comment, same as they would expect to be left alone about their own physical features while changing.
If a person is behaving inappropriately in a changing room, such as staring at the sexual features of many others, or making rude gestures towards or uninvited comments about physical features, then they should be asked to stop or leave and may be subject to punishment by the business and/or local authorities for their behavior — no matter what their own genitalia are, whether they’re a match for the gender label (if any) on the door of the changing room or not.
EXCLUSIVE: 'We're uncomfortable in our own locker room.' Lia Thomas' UPenn teammate tells how the trans swimmer doesn't always cover up her male genitals when changing and their concerns go ignored by their coach
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas...
You’re mistaken about the lack of “hard lines” distinguishing the sexes, though. The difference between male and female is unambiguous in biology. “Trans women” are, by definition, not women.
That is emphatically false. There are innumerable biological differences between men as a whole and women as a whole, and while these different factors largely correlate, they do not necessarily fit neatly into one box or the other. Is an XXY individual with a penis but undescended testes and low levels of blood testosterone and few androgen receptors "biologically" male or female? What about an XX individual with ambiguous external genitalia, high circulating testosterone, and a high number of androgen receptors? What do you make of the fact that females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia are far more likely to identify as LGBT? You are oversimplifying the biology.
That said, the right to create an exclusive space is a fundamental constitutional right. En plus, for socially marginalized groups, it is a societal benefit for them to have a space exclusive to them. I support the creators of this social media app.
It's appropriate to discuss generalities. It's appropriate to discuss individual cases. What is inappropriate is dismissing individual cases to come to a general conclusion, and then insist that it applies universally.
This is also in the context of trans people the vast majority are not biological outliers simply people identifying as something different to their unambiguous biological sex.
To make this claim, you would have had to find an exhaustive list of biological sex differences, and check a large representative random sample of transgender individuals to see whether all of those biological sex traits aligned "unambiguous[ly]" with their assigned birth sex.
Since I am quite confident that this work has not been done, may I suggest deferring to individual people to tell you what is going on in their bodies? While imperfect, self-reporting is still epistemologically far superior to you just pulling this claim out of your ass.
> "Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD."
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07238-8
2. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...
So a city of 1,000,000 people has merely 180 intersex people in it, the rest conform to their sex assigned at birth.
Seems pretty flimsy to claim a 99.99% match rate is wrong because of extreme outliers. It's like claiming the coronavirus PCR tests are worthless because of their (much higher) rate of false negatives/positives.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/
Your single study isn't a debunking. Leonard Sax is a gender activist. He's also just one person who has no degree in genetics. I provided citations of actual research institutions with actual geneticists working for them.
> Seems pretty flimsy to claim a 99.99% match rate is wrong because of extreme outliers.
I didn't claim it was wrong. I claimed it wasn't "cut-and-dry". Nothing you said refutes that. In fact, pointing out any kind of controversy on this topic proves that I was right: there is no clear, undisputed genetic test for someone's sex.
Notably, testing for gender has an accuracy rate that is orders of magnitude more reliable than all conventional coronavirus tests, including multiple PCR tests back-to-back.
As for Eric Vilain, the physician who advocates for extremely harmful (UN's definition) sex assignment procedures on intersex people [1], his wishy-washy definition includes people who have minor genital deformities, according to his own paper. [2]
Just to be crystal clear to drive this point home, Vilain is an advocate of a procedure that causes "severe and life-long physical and mental pain and suffering and can amount to torture and ill-treatment" [1] and which is condemned by intersex advocacy groups. [1]
According to the UN, he is a vehement proponent of torture.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-spectrum-of-s...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4441533/
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Women can be sexed at birth as female, male, intersex, neither; women can have genes for XX, XY, XXY, etc; women can have zero or more genitalia; women can have masculine, feminine, androgynous, mixed facial bone structures.
Each of these is a valid subgroup of women which can, if necessary, be described as a subgroup. Normally, just “women” should suffice, but the app linked by this post actively excludes at least one of those subgroups from the label “women”. So it becomes necessary to discuss those subgroups by name, such as “trans women” and “black women”, in order for discourse to occur.
They might be “male at birth” or “intersex at birth” on certain medical paperwork, and those physical sex characteristic will remain unchanged in subgroup “at birth” regardless of any shift in gender or medical alterations to their present-day sex characteristics.
(To avoid any possible confusion, I’m keeping in mind that “male” is sex and “man” is gender, as this is often confused in discussion of these topics. One’s sex is a physical characteristic like one’s eye color or skin tone; most people assume that everyone has just one and that it doesn’t change, neither of which are true. One’s gender is a behavioral characteristic like accent or musical tastes; it can’t be reliably guessed from any physical characteristic, and it can change at any time, either gradually over years or all at once at a coffee shop or anywhere in between.)
You’re attempting to redefine the gender characteristic “man” in terms of physical sex characteristics “male”, which isn’t valid; this invalidity is proven by the existence of both intersex men and intersex women.
You’re also using the invalid term “biological sex” to refer to “sex at birth”, which can be male, female, or intersex — but due to your imprecise phrasing, your use could also refer to “current sex”, which is a modifiable state that can be altered surgically and thus invalidates your point further.
Minor49er, I don’t think you’re participating in good faith here. You’ve presented a view that doesn’t stand up to the facts after repeatedly being confronted with them in multiple threads, your concluding question “Don’t you agree?” is a direct quote from the sealioning comic, and you’ve asked the mods to delete this post in a different thread while continuing to engage here. You’ll need to shop your anti-trans trolling elsewhere, as it’s not productive for me to engage with you further.
If you’d like to register a complaint with the mods about my participation here, you can email them directly at the footer contact link.
And yes, I asked the mods to delete the story because obviously a lot of posts have been getting flagged. The story appears to be causing a lot of strong responses either for or against Giggle, its community, and its owner. It's simply not resulting in constructive discussion. I mean, you're even accusing me of "ignoring facts" (?) and of being an "anti-trans troll".
Also, what's the sealioning comic?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Dedication to the color "pink" representing women (classical pre-birth gender roles)
- Defining the gender "women" as exclusively people who were sexed female-only at birth (assumption-by-framing discrimination vs. transgender, intersex)
- Implying that gender is permanently affixed through bone structures to each human body at birth (classical definition that gender == sex)
- Declaring that only binary genders "male" and "female" exist (inflexible binary gender roles)
So I expect that this app will end up banned for promoting hate speech as a result — not because they're attempting to create a women-only space, but because they're attempting to create a social space where TERF hate speech is welcomed and encouraged.