Campaigners claim
Rape suspects are able to self-identify as female, it was revealed after a freedom of information request by a feminist policy think-tank.
Police Scotland said that if a rape or attempted rape was perpetrated by a “male who self-identifies as a woman . . . the male who self-identifies as a woman would be expected to be recorded as a female on relevant police systems.”
Campaigners claim that the position could lead to a “distortion” in society’s understanding of crime and the measures needed to tackle it.
“Campaigners claim” – of course it would lead to a distortion. If you falsify the stats so that it looks as if some (or many or all) rapes are perpetrated by women when actually it’s men who call themselves women (perhaps for this purpose alone) then obviously that’s a distortion.
I can think of another: to get close to more women. Being caught and convicted used to be such a downer.
Again, if, for purposes of crime statistics, the word “women” is henceforth going to denote people who think or feel a certain way (what “certain way” and how do we know?) about themselves, then any convicted adult female who doesn’t think or feel that way has to be removed from the crime statistics for “women”, or it’s counting apples as oranges. But once again, it’s all just a bad pun.
We can fix this.
If the police have surrendered the words “male” and “female” to the prevailing trans ideology, then we need new categories to code the relevant information. Add a pair set of checkboxes
[ x] penis-person [ ] vagina-person
Or maybe just a single
[x] has penis
checkbox.
If the trans activists still aren’t happy (will they ever be happy?) then we dispense with words altogether and attach a picture of the suspect’s genitals. So a mug shot now has three pictures: face, profile, and crotch.
It isn’t convenient to run statistics on photographs, but we could train an AI to look at the crotch shots and classify them as M/F. AI is notorious for not living up to its hype, but I’ll bet that for this particular task–classifying human genitals as M/F–an AI will be very reliable.
Re #3, that will not work. As trans activists are fond of pointing out, this means that men who have lost genitals to accident or surgery are no longer men. It also means that a woman who has had a fake penis constructed is now a man.
Being male or female means a preponderance of several characteristics, all of which are present in most male or female people, but some are missing some of them. I would suggest that the chromosome test is a more reliable single-characteristic test, and less intrusive.
#4, but that’s just the point.
The trans activists want to claim the words for themselves and cut them loose from their conventional meanings. They can’t do that for common usage, because common usage is established by…uhhh…common usage, and they don’t control that (yet. They’d like to. They’re working on it.) But they do control official usage, via agency capture.
So we accept the loss and move on. The way we move on is by surrendering the words and focusing on the facts that matter. In a rape case, the fact that matters is does the suspect have a penis? If so, you have an ordinary rape case, and the sex of the suspect is irrelevant.
Likewise, give up reporting rape statistics by the sex of the assailant, and report them instead by the instrument of rape: penis, finger, foreign object. Having a “rape by penis” category in the national crime statistics will probably put some people’s backs up, but, well, given the size of that number, maybe their backs should be up.
I see what you’re saying now.
I still disagree. A man who grew up as a man and has the build of a man, but who now does not have a penis, is still a man, is still a beneficiary of male puberty, male socialization, and male privilege, and should not be housed with women prisoners or allowed into women’s changing areas or allowed to play on women’s sports teams or given awards intended for women. Such a man will never get cervical cancer, but may get prostate cancer. Such a man may have been a father, but will never be a mother. All those things matter, too.
I don’t agree that we should give up on the words man/woman, and I especially don’t agree that we should give up on the concept of biological sex as represented by something more than the presence or absence of a penis. That’s giving up far too much.
I have to agree with Sackbut. If we give up those words, we are conceding defeat. We are letting TWAW become definitionally true, not just delusionally true. If we give up those words, they will come for the next set of words that take their place. I’ve already heard trans-vagina for penis; what’s next? They will leave none of the words women use to describe ourselves and each other untouched, while doing only minor damage to the idea of man and men.
They are coming for women, and we need to withstand. This is not the time to concede any ground. They have already proven themselves quite adept at shifting the Overton window.
#6 Sackbut, I didn’t say any of that. I was just talking about how to get rape reporting statistics in the face of agency capture that is corrupting the raw data.
I considered adding /sarcasm/ tags, but I’m not sure whether I was being sarcastic or not. No police agency is going to add crotch shots to mug shots–the privacy issues are insurmountable. They probably won’t even add a [x] has penis checkbox. I still think it would be worth asking for a [x] has penis checkbox, if only to rub people’s noses in the reality of what is going on.
#7 iknklast, yes, they are coming for the rest of the words. If we get a [x] has penis checkbox, expect them to claim that the thing between a trans woman’s legs isn’t a penis, on the grounds that women don’t have penises. And then maybe we do demand crotch shots. If they are going to take away all the words, then all we have left is holding up pictures and pointing at them.
Re #8
Sorry, it was hard to figure whether you were being sarcastic, and if so about what.
Perhaps you are suggesting that the US use the UK definition of “rape”, meaning strictly penetration by penis, with other current forms moved into sodomy or something similar. That might be useful. Then a TIM convicted of rape would be unambiguously a TIM regardless of the changes to other aspects of the records that get mucked up.
It certainly has the advantage of the training set being enormous.