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Again, culturally- and regionally-specific. My anecdotal evidence is that the people I've talked to (a narrow, biased group of people) have more nuanced views t

Again, culturally- and regionally-specific. My anecdotal evidence is that the people I've talked to (a narrow, biased group of people) have more nuanced views than the surveys pick up. Where I live, more people support the death penalty than are transphobic (according to polling, no less!). Most people don't know the first thing about anything. Ask them what we should do about climate change, and they'll say "household recycling". Ask them whether they're okay with the environmental impact of a nuclear power station, and they'll say they're outraged about it. The uninformed opinion of people who haven't really thought very hard, when presented with a loaded question, is not particularly indicative of the process they use to form their views: it's more indicative of your sampling method. I don't know much about how sanctuaries and safe spaces are run, but it's my understanding that they don't generally have "we accept anyone who meets this sentence-long description" policies. Round these parts, shelters have always been able to discriminate against trans people with reason, and they haven't been doing so, and it hasn't been an issue: public sentiment is just that. People have been medically-transitioning in English-speaking cultures for well over a century, now, and it's only been a Big Deal in the last couple of decades. Politics.

dover 4y ago
[flagged]
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  …? No? It indicates that the anti-discrimination law permits you to discriminate, so long as you have a good reason for it. I'll add: the current fuss about "protecting women's spaces" is pointless, because the right they're arguing for already exists, and the people running shelters by-and-large aren't invoking it. If they want domestic violence shelters to refuse service to trans people (who are, btw, more often victims of domestic violence than their cisgender counterparts), they should be campaigning against the charities that run the shelters, not campaigning, protesting and petitioning to change laws that are already the way they want them. If helping the vulnerable were causing actual problems, they'd be able to cite instances of those problems over the past three decades, rather than just appealing to hypothetical situations that might even have happened, once, somewhere in the world, but probably haven't.
  - dover 4y ago
    > I'll add: the current fuss about "protecting women's spaces" is pointless > rather than just appealing to hypothetical situations These aren't hypothetical situations. In some jurisdictions, prisoners are housed based on their self-declared "gender identity". So men who declare themselves as women are being incarcerated in the female prison estate. Women inmates have been raped, sexually assaulted, and even impregnated by some of these men. This is what happens when this polite fiction becomes law and policy, abusive men take advantage of it - undermining the very reason why we have sex-separated spaces in the first place. Protecting women's spaces from men who call themselves women is very important for the safeguarding of vulnerable women.
    - defrost 4y ago
      > These aren't hypothetical situations. In some jurisdictions, ... It would be very interesting to see the actual official statistics on this, alongside the data on the number of women prisoners raped and impregnated by male guards. My suspicion is that the former numbers are over exagerated in importance and the later numbers are sharply underr reported .. but I'd still be interested in your best link to back up your claim and put it in context.
      - dover 4y ago
        > women prisoners raped and impregnated by male guards This is why in the UK, women's prisons have a policy where at least 50% of prison officers must be female, and only female officers are allowed to conduct intimate searches where needed, to mitigate against the risk of sexual abuse by males. That there is an existing, mitigated risk of male sexual predation from prison staff, does not justify further increasing this risk to female inmates by locking them up 24/7 with men, just because these men call themselves women. We have sex-segregated prisons for good reason, this was the result of very well documented evidence, from prison reformers of the 19th century, of the harm and abuse of woman that is enabled by mixed-sex prisons.
        defrost 4y ago

dover 4y ago

[flagged]

wizzwizz4 4y ago
…? No? It indicates that the anti-discrimination law permits you to discriminate, so long as you have a good reason for it. I'll add: the current fuss about "protecting women's spaces" is pointless, because the right they're arguing for already exists, and the people running shelters by-and-large aren't invoking it. If they want domestic violence shelters to refuse service to trans people (who are, btw, more often victims of domestic violence than their cisgender counterparts), they should be campaigning against the charities that run the shelters, not campaigning, protesting and petitioning to change laws that are already the way they want them. If helping the vulnerable were causing actual problems, they'd be able to cite instances of those problems over the past three decades, rather than just appealing to hypothetical situations that might even have happened, once, somewhere in the world, but probably haven't.
- dover 4y ago
  > I'll add: the current fuss about "protecting women's spaces" is pointless > rather than just appealing to hypothetical situations These aren't hypothetical situations. In some jurisdictions, prisoners are housed based on their self-declared "gender identity". So men who declare themselves as women are being incarcerated in the female prison estate. Women inmates have been raped, sexually assaulted, and even impregnated by some of these men. This is what happens when this polite fiction becomes law and policy, abusive men take advantage of it - undermining the very reason why we have sex-separated spaces in the first place. Protecting women's spaces from men who call themselves women is very important for the safeguarding of vulnerable women.
  - defrost 4y ago
    > These aren't hypothetical situations. In some jurisdictions, ... It would be very interesting to see the actual official statistics on this, alongside the data on the number of women prisoners raped and impregnated by male guards. My suspicion is that the former numbers are over exagerated in importance and the later numbers are sharply underr reported .. but I'd still be interested in your best link to back up your claim and put it in context.
    - dover 4y ago
      > women prisoners raped and impregnated by male guards This is why in the UK, women's prisons have a policy where at least 50% of prison officers must be female, and only female officers are allowed to conduct intimate searches where needed, to mitigate against the risk of sexual abuse by males. That there is an existing, mitigated risk of male sexual predation from prison staff, does not justify further increasing this risk to female inmates by locking them up 24/7 with men, just because these men call themselves women. We have sex-segregated prisons for good reason, this was the result of very well documented evidence, from prison reformers of the 19th century, of the harm and abuse of woman that is enabled by mixed-sex prisons.
      - defrost 4y ago