Interesting Links for 14-06-2020

[andrewducker]

Would you believe your har grows an inch every minute?

(tags:hair comic xkcd )

China will not send ducks to tackle locusts in Pakistan, says expert

(tags:china ducks pakistan headline )

Edinburgh Council is looking for commens about measures which could support healh and physical distancing. Comment here!

(tags:edinburgh transport pandemic )

Boris Johnson said colonialism in Africa should never have ended and dismissed Britain's role in slavery

(tags:UK slavery BorisJohnson )

Rupert Grint joins JK Rowling transgender row (in a good way)

(tags:LGBT transgender jkrowling )

Why am I supposed to like gin? It's just ruined vodka

(tags:alcohol review )

The extraordinary case of the Guevedoces, who only grow a penis aged 12.

(tags:children boys gender biology humans )

What awfulness are the government planning on the transgender front?

https://threader.app/thread/1272054857676062720
(tags:transgender LGBT conservatives OhForFucksSake )

Google's automated systems managed to lose Winston Churchill (clearly no automated testing there)

(tags:Incompetence government history uk )

Comments

[cmcmck]

It's even worse than the folks on the 'awfulness' thread seem to think.

It would only effect people who have NOT had GC surgery. Those of us who have are covered by the Equality Act as well as the GR Act and if it came to showing a BC (can you imagine that) mine says 'girl'.

Also we need to recall that the relevant act was the result of an ECtHR judgement which is NOT EU but pan European law. That makes tinkering that much more difficult.

And yet again, if I'm not saying, how does anyone suppose they'll know? If anyone is put at real risk by this it's butch lesbians given the way the public think about gender identity.

And further, it seems that the only trans people are trans women..........

Oh, and the number of attacks on women in women's toilets in the UK by hairy 9' men in dresses, ever?

Zero.

[rmc28]

I (cis woman) am not especially butch, but I'm fat, wear no makeup, and keep my hair very short. I've never been misgendered while wearing a dress, but have more than once when in trousers and a baggy top. So yeah, if people start policing access to toilets on appearance, they might well flag me unless I'm wearing a dress. SUCH FUN. How very equal rights for women.

[cmcmck]

Especially considering that I'm trans, 5'6" and slight and never get misgendered- the result of being born with the hormonal condition PAIS which means I have no Adam's apple and my voice didn't break when I got pushed through puberty the wrong way. Well, you saw the userpic above........

If you consider the TERF (and Rowling) definition of women as people who bleed, that's going to exclude a lot more women than women like me!

[rmc28]

*snerk* I don't bleed either (as a bonus side-effect of my contraception), and I'm quite looking forward to being old enough that I can stop worrying about either.

[naath]

huh, my contraception means I don't bleed; other women are too young, too old, too pregnant, or have had hysterectomies because they had illness... Apparently I was a woman between 11 and 23ish?

[cmcmck]

Also those with amenorrhea (includes quite a few athletes, that) and many another condition.

[naath]

Gin is nice; snotty reviewer dislikes it, that's more for me.

[anna_wing]

Would it be more straightforward to try to widen the range of generally socially acceptable behaviour in terms of dress, appearance etc for either sex? So that social behaviour can essentially be unisex, in the same way thaT, say, jeans and a T-shirt is unisex dress.

[andrewducker]

Many people who transition do not slot into traditional standards of gender behaviour. Changing those standards will not help them.

[anna_wing]

Why not? Would not a wider standard include more people? Not everyone transitions for different reasons, obviously, so changes in gender norms wouldn't help every case, but not everything is for everyone, that is true of every situation.

Anyway "traditional standards" vary hugely, even within a country, let alone globally, and change all the time. While most gender norms are quite rigid when you eventually hit the hard limits, they are rigid in different ways and in different directions, in different circucmstances (in my own situation, again, just as one example, the range of 'acceptable' is much bigger for women than men, and for senior people than for junior people - so far so normal, there).
Another example: in Yangon (Myanmar), only ten years ago, there was men's dress and headgear and there was women's dress and hairstyles, and if a person wore the style considered appropriate for the sex they wanted to be seen as, it was (in some cases, at least) accepted at face value without more. This particular quirk sometimes applied to same-sex couples as well; so long as one party wore women's dress and the other wore men's dress, polite society would not enquire further (customary marriage between Buddhists in Myanmar is between the parties and does not require legal or external religious validation or registration, so that was not an issue).

Globalised business increases pressure for flexibility, as people get used to meeting people whose dress, hairstyle or demeanour is not what they in their own culture would find "traditional" for their sex, and this changes what is traditional too. A Southeast-Asian friend (some thirty years ago now), had some initial difficulty with her Japanese boyfriend's parents, since they were of the view that she was "a man in a skirt" (direct quote, when she told me about it!). They got used to it. As a rule, Japanese women working overseas don't generally conform to the traditional standards of gender behaviour in Japan either.

[andrewducker]

Because what they're interested in isn't the kind of clothes that are worn, or hairstyles, it's being recognised as being the gender they identify with.

[anna_wing]

I think that this is probably one of those culturally-specific worldview differences. But thank you for taking the time to explain your viewpoint.

[andrewducker]

Culturally specific in what way?

The battle to be recognised as the gender they identify as (and in many cases have had medical intervention to make themselves fit with) is what transgender people have been fighting for.

Where is it different?

[anna_wing]

From reading the links, it seems that you conceive of gender as a personal sense of being male or female that is entirely distinct and separate from either the male or female body (in the sense of everyone being either XX or XY, sometimes with additions or hormonal or other interferences; but always X and Y, no W or Z), or the social behaviours associated with the male or female body, which obviously vary. I may be misunderstanding, obviously. But if that is a correct understanding, I don't understand how that can happen, and it seems to me a variant of the Cartesian dualist error.

Incidentally, based on the links, it seemed to me that the opposition by some women to your legislation on self-identification of sex/gender is not so much concern about transgender persons in themselves, as it is worry about the permissions being taken advantage of non-transgender predators. I think that it would be a legitimate concern for a woman in a shelter for abused woman, that her (probably male) abuser could not be allowed to come in under the guise of being a transgender woman. I think that safeguards to deal with this concern would be a proper thing to have, and might reassure some opponents of this legislation.

In any case, it is clear that this is a significant ideological issue at least in some countries, and therefore not something that I am going to argue about on the internet.

[cmcmck]

I was an undergrad in the seventies when 'uniform' for most of us, male or female, was flared Levis, cheesecloth top and clogs plus long hair all round.

Yet separate loos were still the thing.

Many a trans guy sports a beard so forcing them into the ladies' could be wildly entertaining! But they always seem to forget the guys.

I slot into the binary neatly but as Andrew says, many people don't.

Why am I supposed to like gin? It's just ruined vodka

[jducoeur]

Articles like this annoy me just as much (and for the same reason) as triumphalist ones that claim that everybody should live gin.

Let's be clear: gin is an acquired taste. So is scotch. So is beer. (So is the reviewer's beloved vodka, for that matter.) As someone who acquired all of those tastes in adulthood, I have little patience for people who pretend (either pro or con) that these things should be considered absolutes.

If you like it, great. If you don't, great. Being loudly proud of it either way, though, is just kind of weird...