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The UK’s Anti-Trans Ruling Is a Defeat for All Women

www.thenation.com

The UK’s Anti-Trans Ruling Is a Defeat for All Women

Even the self-described feminists celebrating the Supreme Court’s attempt to banish trans people from womanhood will pay a heavy price.

Archived version without paywall: https://archive.is/vOqSz

14 comments

  • The problem is more the idea that single sex spaces would be a thing at all, and that people would be able to use 'sex' to discriminate instead of using gender (which would automatically include trans people), not that the supreme court said that sex actually does mean sex - as far as I understand it, please explain to me if I'm wrong.

    • It's a major problem for Trans people, because the rule effectively bars someone by their superficial appearance from using the "sex appropriate" facility and then bars them by their birth identity from using their "sex presenting" facility. It is, in effect, a full exclusion of transgender people from any gender oriented facility.

      But it becomes even more nefarious when employed maliciously against any cis-person who fails to present themselves sufficient to some arbitrary standard of masculinity/femininity. The end result is anyone who can conceivably be "clocked" as transgender - from tomboys to post-menopausal women - is now a potential target for harassment, detention, and legal sanction.

      We are approaching a point of public policy at which you're effectively saying "Only Barbie can use the lady's room and only Ken can use the men's room".

      • But this seems to be working within a system where single sex spaces exist and are used to discriminate. As a nonbinary person, I am very aware of how just the idea of having 'men's' and 'women's' rooms is already discriminatory, the court ruling didn't create that. It just said that where single sex spaces already exist, sex means sex. Presumably where single gender spaces exist, trans people would be included, and where gender neutral spaces exist, everyone is included. Gender neutral spaces should be what we're pushing for, not confusing the terms sex and gender to play into the already discriminatory system we have.

    • That comment is vague enough that I'm not going to bother guessing what you mean, but the reification fallacy is a common trap for fascists, whose ideology depends upon making their preferred version of reality the "correct" one.

      If sex is biological, then we as humans can only observe it secondhand via complicated and potentially ambiguous medical tests. Our direct experience only shows us what someone looks and sounds like, which can also be ambiguous.

      In the Real Physical World, you can't always tell. The people who don't want to take that ambiguity seriously are trapped in an artificial world of language where they value their own prescriptive ideals for what the words mean much higher than the reality that words were invented to describe.

14 comments