Guest post: Not even the threadbare legal fiction
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The persistent framing.
As much as I sympathize with Hutchinson, I wish everybody on the gc “side” would stop bringing up whether or not TIM have had surgeries, taken hormones etc. as if it made a difference. Even if he had, it still wouldn’t make him a woman, nor make it any more acceptable for him to enter women’s changing rooms.
I agree, but sometimes I think it’s important to spell out for the naive and clueless (like me from a few years ago) that things are worse than they seem. How many are aware of the fact that most TiMs have not undergone surgical “transition”? I wasn’t. Under self-ID there’s absolutely nothing, not even the threadbare legal fiction (i.e. lie) of a GRC to keep any and all men from identifying into women’s facilities. They’ve completely gutted the perfectly reasonable and prudent safeguarding concept of “Schrodinger’s rapist.” Make them explain how this works, and how they can tell the “safe” males from the “unsafe” with such precision and reliability that the former can be let in while still keeping the latter out. They can’t of course, yet they believe they have some power to do so, and that identifying “as a woman” somehow magically renders men who do so completely harmless. It’s all bullshit, and they know it. They don’t care about women’s safety. Women don’t matter. Women have already paid too high a price for this willful malevolence disguised as a “human rights” campaign. Women have been pushing back for years, but are still portrayed as hateful bigots for doing so. How dare McGovern push and prod and browbeat women to force them to accept men into women’s spaces? How dare she try to force Hutchinson to submit to and use the Newspeak redefinition of “woman” against her own interests? How dare she feign any kind of pontificating, judgemental superiority, and claim to hold the moral high ground when she’s the one who is essentially defending and promoting the “right” of sexual predators to enter women’s spaces? She should be sacked.
Hutchinson could have put it differently, or better, but I think that using surgically “transitioned” males as a rhetorical, “best case,” “steel man” scenario is useful. The fact that they’re willing to accept the carte blanche to predators that is self-ID, shows just how shitty the genderists’ position is. Taking this approach spells out what transactivists are willing to defend, and shows what they’ve already been able to force upon women. The fact that this open invitation for predators under self-ID stands even if TiMs are as completely harmless as they are claimed to be (which of course they are not), demonstrates how extreme the genderists’ position is. It shows their continuing, unrepentant, bloody-minded commitment to keep on sacrificing women’s safety in its pursuit and defence. Exposing that is worth something.
“Make them explain how this works, and how they can tell the “safe” males from the “unsafe” with such precision and reliability that the former can be let in while still keeping the latter out.”
The counter-argument is usually that dangerous males will enter the women’s room even if it’s single-sex. Of course, it’s also claimed that TIMs have to use the women’s room for their safety. It doesn’t seem all that coherent to me.
Even assuming that aggressors don’t enter the women’s facilities, the whole “safety” argument isn’t convincing. If it’s unsafe for you to share a washroom with other males, making another washroom open to males and going there instead won’t fix anything. And if you assume that people won’t overstep their boundaries, then you have no reason to be worried in the first place.
I agree back, but most people are not that careful with how they express themselves. Too often people make it sound as if the lack of medical “transition” were the problem, and if not for that there would be nothing wrong with TIMs entering women’s spaces, competing in women’s sports etc.
I am making the same point in a post I am working on. I have come to think of it as the “Wolf in Trans Clothing” argument.
Of course, making a point of whether or not someone has a GRC is, if at all possible, even worse. I also hate it when people frame it in terms of “commitment”, or willingness to make “sacrifices”, or putting in the “effort”. As Helen Joyce correctly put it ( from memory), womanhood is not a reward.