Any problems
latsot alerts us to a useful Twitter thread.
There are no images or other toys so I’ll just quote the rest of it.
Firstly, I’d need to know that there was actually research being done on the effects of the policy, particularly wrt those most likely to be affected by the loss of sex as a clearly defined category (women, gay people, anyone affected by safeguarding procedures).
I’d need to know it was somehow possible to gather and analyse these data reliably, despite the confusion between sex and gender. I’d want to see the data tracking patterns over a long time period to monitor societal changes.
I’d want to see that there hadn’t been an increase in crime against women. I’d want evidence that women were not self-excluding from situations that they would have accessed on a single-sex basis. I’d want to know that there was no reduction in the services that women need, and that women were still willing to access them.
I’d want to know that women’s chances in sport had not been affected. I’d want to know that religious women hadn’t suffered due to loss of single-sex spaces.
I’d want to know that safeguarding procedures were still robust, that children still had rights to single-sex facilities, that people could still request, and access, a health or care provider of their own sex when it was important to them.
I’d want to know that demographic data was still sound, that service planning hadn’t been negatively impacted. I’d want to track any effect on the pay gap and on women’s employment. I’d want to know there were no human rights abuses (such as mixed-sex prisons).
I’d want to know if the policy made things better, worse, or unchanged for the most vulnerable in society. That’s just off the top of my (non-expert) head. What have I got wrong? What have I missed?
There’s all that, but there’s also just the fundamental ground-level fact that truth matters. There are some categories a human can identify into or out of, and there are others where that makes no sense. We need things to make sense. People can play and dream and imagine and fantasize that they are birds or planets or trees or the other sex all day long, but they can’t impose their fantasies on the rest of us. That may seem boring and confining but is it really? It seems to me that privacy is good for fantasy – more free, less beholden to anyone else. Anyway whether it is or not, we all have the right to remain non-complicit in anyone else’s fantasy.
Therein lies the crux of the issue for me.
Why is it the fantasy of transgenderism, alone, that seems to get the social pass not only without official question, but also with actual penalties towards those people (mostly women) who dare to question it?
As an example, I have often asked why the notions of Otherkin aren’t similarly respected, lauded, and enshrined in law. Why aren’t people who claim to be dragons born in human bodies recognized as such in legal documents and procedures; why aren’t people who think that they are cats provided litter boxes in public restrooms, as they deserve?
The truth argument is obviously important, but less relevant, I think, to whether self-ID has truly been implemented in other countries ‘without problems’. It matters whether or not that’s true just because it does but we still need to be able to convince ourselves of whichever it is, even if we’re unlikely to convince anyone else.
What I like about this post is that it’s skepticism 101. There’s an awful lack of it around. I find myself having to teach people over and over again what evidence is, only to have my definition rejected as too inconvenient. To them, ‘evidence’ is something written down which superficially seems to broadly support some part of their argument. This becomes ‘evidence’ for the whole of their argument now, in the past and however it may change in the future.
And then here it is in a nutshell: what is our hypothesis? How do we test it? It’s like a breath of fresh air.
I imagine this approach will be rejected just as quickly for the same reason, but it’s good to have in mind when people dole out these mindless ‘truths’. And it helps us identify where studies and results and so on fit into arguments and where data is missing and needs to be collected.
For the record, I don’t quite agree with everything in the thread, or rather, I wouldn’t have put them quite that way. But it would be nice to have an adult conversation for once, arguing out the details.
Tracking data related to sex is vital. It would be really nice then if police stopped recording crimes by trans women as crimes by women; failing this, they contribute to muddied data.