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Originally Posted by
Montmorency
I'm still not sure what subject we're currently on, but a couple problems:
Neither am I.
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1. This assumes that any attempt, or any means, to mitigate "small risk" is equally appropriate or salutary. To some extent deterrence is a component of any criminal justice system - yet we do not condone systematic torture toward deterrence basically because it's evil (and less saliently ineffective). Alternatively, men commit the lion's share (tee hee) of violent crimes. Would it be just to establish matriarchy and heavily subordinate men in the name of public safety?
2. It is historically false to say that gendered bathrooms were introduced as a response to men assaulting women in shared spaces. Perhaps you made this assumption because you were applying your contemporary perspective to historical contexts.
1. You are correct that not all restrictions are necessary salutatory, but the argument over restrictions in bathroom use (and other breastfeeding in public) take the opposite extreme - any restriction is discrimination. It is this latter position I have a problem with. I use the comparison of gun ownership because, contrary to popular belief, gun ownership is actually historically quite popular in the UK, and also in Australia and New Zealand - but all three countries have ultimately taken the same stance on gun ownership in response to pretty much their first or second mass shooting.
Similar arguments are even being had over the actual process of assigning sex at birth where some queer people see this as an infringement of the child or parents' rights. In my view our society is becoming overly permissive in allowing people to self-define their identity rather than having their identity be at least partially defined by society. Remember, society is the collection of people you live with - it needs to have some rules and structures so that people understand how to get along. Something like assigning sex (as opposed to gender) at birth should not be controversial except in the unlikely event that the child is intersex.
2. Prior to female-only bathrooms there were only male-only bathrooms. Women had to urinate in gutters.
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Maybe it's not necessarily the case. But is it not the case? Justification is warranted. An employer may genuinely be worried that Asian candidates are indolent thieves; what's the source of this worry, and is it changeable?
Honestly, I've seen the "man in a dress" on the street. It's something you notice precisely because of the incongruity, it's usually a middle-aged man, walking like a middle-aged man, wearing a very silly dress and a very bad wig. This will be, in some cases, a transgender woman only coming out late in life trying to shake off a mess of learned behaviours where "he" was trying to be as manly as possible to cover up who she was.
I'm not unsympathetic, but the bald truth is that if you saw her walking into the female toilets following your teenage daughter it looks like a middle-aged man wearing a dress as an excuse to walk into the toilets following your teenage daughter.
Now, as a father, what do you do in that circumstance? Risk your daughter being assaulted, or risk being arrested for assaulting a woman who has spent her life pretending to be a man? It's quite easy to see why many fathers would just default to option one on a visceral level, even if they don't follow through.
It's also quite easy to understand why a man who's never had to think hard about his sexuality or gender, and even more so one who has but concluded he's actually a straight man anyway, will be sceptical of the "man in a dress."
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You arrest on the basis of ownership, not on the basis of intention. And anyway, you neglect consideration of whether a particular law is reasonable or not. I'm confident you don't believe that literally any restriction is legitimate or desirable; thus the necessary recourse is to the facts of the matter.
That's right - we arrest anyone carrying a penknife in public without a good excuse. I think that's repressive, don't you?
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Sure you are, as you admit in the next clause. But every system has inconsistencies, are you really complaining that we haven't realized some utopian ideal?
Britain is simply not a liberal society - America is - my point is that when you are only selectively Liberal about the things YOU think people should be allowed to do you aren't really Liberals. Liberals let people do the things they think they shouldn't be allowed to do.
Pretty obviously it's much easier for a man to deploy a camera in a unisex toilet with a sinlge cubicle - he has a legitimate reason to be there and nobody can see him. So, this is clearly a downside of unisex toilets, especially single cubicle ones - although the same applies to enclosed cubicles.
The only way around that is to either have regular sweeps for bugs or CCTV in the cubicles.
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THe problem here is two-fold, that you assume without evidence there are significant opportunities for abuse created, and that you fail to even notice the "over-liberalization" is advocated for the opportunities for abuse that it eliminates. Again, why do you think there's a problem with transgender people doing what they already do when they can? You are proposing a restriction, like how before the 1970s Britain restricted gay men by pursuing them into bathrooms in the name of public morality. And what do these restrictions do in service of segregating genders. It is difficult to make sense of the logic unless you reject the social status of transgenders and seek to characterize their behavior as injurious to public safety - which would be a prejudicial stance.
When did I actually say "transexuals should be barred from the bathroom of the sex they identify with"?
Good God, I posted a picture of Nicole Maines, challenged Beskar to tell her her gender was artificial and said I thought she was cute the last season of Supergirl.
Here's her wikipedia bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Maines
That being said, I can understand why some people WOULD want such a ban
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Again, the fact that guns are restricted does not mean that any hypothetical restriction is merited.
Again, whilst this is true the reverse also follows - if we can accept gun restriction then not all restrictions are immoral.
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Correct me if I'm missing something, but here you've argued that it is appropriate to (eliding implementation) prevent transgenders from using bathrooms not aligned with their assigned birth sex, and you have argued that unisex spaces are bad and contribute to sex crimes. I'm not sure whether you are trying to link these two lines of thought. Do you argue the two points above, and if so, do you have any connection to make between them? And why?
Yes - you completely missed the part where I didn't argue against transexuals using the appropriate (as in the one corresponding to their identified sex) bathroom. I am, however, against unisex facilities - which is something many Queer people (which is not the same lobby as the transgender lobby, necessarily) are increasingly pushing for.
I'm 100% behind the transgender lobby on this issue. Having said that, I do have reservations about a trend developing where every teenager with gender dis-morphia is diagnosed as transgender or transexual.
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I haven't seen you try to understand our positions very hard. :creep:
Per the preceding, go ahead and clarify your position. Be sure to specify how we can tell there is no whiff of prejudice.
My position is that I don't think people should be punished for holding view which were mainstream 20 years ago but which now have become unfashionable. I note that you described Furunculus' expression of caution on this topic as "not respectable" which verges on an accusation of prejudice, just for not wholeheartedly agreeing.
That sort of thought pattern is prevalent in religious fundamentalists, it's the sort of think that the Taliban thinks - executing people who aren't Muslim "enough".
A Liberal society should be tolerant of differing views, it should be able to debate them calmly and rationally without resorting to name-calling.
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I would ask why women should adhere to your standard of modesty, and why two different categories of women should adhere to the same standard despite your highlighting that they are different categories, but really the important thing is that what you personally feel is whatever, you're entitled to your opinion - so long as you don't advocate regulation of breastfeeding women by law, business, or civil society. Same by garishly-dressed transpersons or anyone else whose style you disapprove of. We've all been there. (I really hope you are not so traditionalist as to advocate reinstating sumptuary laws...)
Why shouldn't breastfeeding be regulated by law? Urination is regulated by law, sleeping is regulated by law.
It's not my standard of modesty, anyway, it's the generally accepted standard in most Anglophone countries - women are expected to not bear their breasts in public. From that it logically follows that it should be fine for women to breastfeed in public, so long as they don't expose their breasts. The women sitting on public benches with a child suckling their dress around their waste and both breasts exposed are making a political statement.
They are using their nudity to force society to acknowledge that they are breastfeeding in public. I get it, but I don't approve of the tactic, and I don't approve of people life that Museum steward being punished for asking them to adhere to the same standards of PUBLIC decency as EVERYONE else.
Asking women to use a shawl is not some terrible patriarchal imposition, it's asking them to have consideration of others, especially other parents with children who may not want them exposed to nude women.
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Are you making this judgement after diligent reference to modern medical literature and practice? Why do you think there is a willy-nilly approach to gender dysphoria?
I've read quite a lot of journalism on the topic and also a few papers - look up the Tavistock Centre and the recent controversy there. It's not a "willy-nilly" approach so much as a "one size fits all" approach which includes mastectomy for teenage girls and castration for teenage boys.
I've definitely read of cases where teenage girls have been identified as transgender and undergone hormone treatment and surgery at age 16.
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Hmm. Do you think they can be "allowed" to question your view of them?
At the present time I would say that anyone who, on meeting someone who claims to be transgender, questions that person's claim can probably expect to lose their job.
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Is your social hierarchy centered on (a monolithic image of) teenage boys? Who cares.
I think the greatest threat the teenage girls is probably teenage boys, from personal experience.
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Hmmm, Britain may be your city but you're forgetting the diversity that exists among liberal Western governments. For example, over nearly a century American jurisprudence has increasingly reinforced a free-speech regime that is perhaps the closest a society has ever come to absolutism.
I referenced this above, that doesn't make the supposedly Liberal Britain less repressive.
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So teach them. From what I see and hear children are less cruel and chauvinistic than they were a generation ago. There's nothing wrong with looking at girls or boys so long as one isn't an asshole about it, and doesn't develop derogatory or exclusionary mindset.
Who was it said, "Children are little barbarians and the purpose of education is to civilise them before they grow up cause the collapse of society."?
Walking down the street of a Saturday Night I don't think the students are that much more enlightened than they were a decade ago. Certainly, few are the young, intelligent, assertive female academics not relived when I offer to walk them home.
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Oh yeah, just to shoehorn another instantiation for the upper reaches: I might be worried about black students attending my daughter's school because I'm worried about sexual assault... That would be a shameful worry to maintain. To act on it would be a basic exercise of racism, and ought-need be called out as such.
What about, say, an influx of young boys from a country like Afghanistan where "woman's rights" are considered optional at best? Is it still shameful to be worried? Or, what about merging of school districts that brings in a group of which boys from a rough neighbourhood with a reputation for drug use and not being safe after dark. Still shameful?
There's a difference between being concerned about people outside your social group not adhering to your standards and racism. If you're just worried because the boy is black then that's obviously racist, it's a little different if he's from a slum because then you need to ask yourself if it's the colour he is or the slum he's from.
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I think that's a reasonable conclusion. Presumably a world-government would have to be structured in a bipolar fashion to maximize subsidiarity, local autonomy plus self-sufficiency, and inter-municipal solidarity and cooperation alongside the global apparatus. The latter would have to have built-in safeguards to shrink or restructure over time while augmenting and safeguarding the horizontal mechanisms of democratic power at the bottom of the dumbbell-form. It would not work well for long without a universally-educated and activated populace. It would be the hardest thing we've ever done. But we can never let perfect be the enemy of good - while juggling the importance of aspiration and high expectations.
I don't see world government as necessarily "good", I think world peace is good - but that's just the absence of violence, it's not a political order.
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Also, there's the whole thing with the specter of species-wide civilizational collapse dogging us...
Rome is always falling, and always because of natural disasters.
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As long as we're speaking of bygones, you seem much colder this go around. I've been feeling it almost for half a year. Is that a real thing?
Colder? I don't know, life's not much fun these days, aside from still being trapped in this PhD I'm in increasing pain as my joints take a beating from my Palsy. I'm probably less playful and more direct than I used to be. I don't really have the time or mental energy to write page-long screeds on one line of the Bible any more just for fits and giggle.
Plus, if I make an offhand comment suggesting maybe, just maybe, a man with a teenage daughter might have some legitimate reservations about allowing non-certified people who claim a transgender identity sharing a washroom with said daughter it becomes a whole thing.
Now I'm having to explain, repeatedly, that I don't personally have a problem with trangender people in certain bathrooms, but I have a problem with people who do just being tarred as prejudiced - as though that sort of view wasn't completely normal less than two decades ago.
I come from a fairly liberal family that generally goes along with trying to strike a balance between tradition, common courtesy and everyone just getting along. Increasingly the world, online and offline, seems to resemble an Early-Modern state where any deviation from the accepted social orthodoxy is severely punished by society, and that orthodoxy is also rapidly changing.