Interesting Links for 19-05-2022

[andrewducker]

1. There's a plan for 200 homes and green offices at Edinburgh's old Scottish Widows HQ

(tags:Edinburgh housing )

2. There are only 10 types of movies.

(tags:movies posters viaSwampers )

3. DS9 series suggestion: Quark's

(tags:StarTrek TV )

4. Transphobes are the ones making up new definitions

(tags:language transgender LGBT bigotry )

5. Four countries pledge tenfold rise in EU offshore wind power capacity

(tags:windpower europe )

6. Edinburgh Zoo penguin Mrs Wolowitz is thought to be the oldest of her species in the world

(tags:penguins age edinburgh zoo )

7. A galactic collision strips dark matter, starts star formation

(tags:darkness physics space )

8. Weed legalisation linked to drop in alcohol, tobacco consumption

(tags:marijuana legalisation alcohol tobacco cigarettes )

9. Girls see physics as for white men only, MPs told

(tags:racism sexism society uk science physics Education )

10. Two thirds of Edinburgh residents would cycle if there were more separated cycle lanes

(tags:edinburgh cycling polls )

11. "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting," Ten Years On

(tags:society lgbt racism sexism history patriarchy kyriarchy )

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

4. What a nice thread by your fellow Andrew there. :)

[andrewducker]

I try to collect the more decent ones :-)

[cmcmck]

4. Guess I could become a cisphobe if the mood was really on me, but why would I be? :o)

[qilora]

"6. Edinburgh Zoo penguin Mrs Wolowitz"

back in Mrs Wolowitz's day you had to swim upstream both ways to catch your fishes, and you caught ONE herring per day and were grateful! dang nabit!

[qilora]

"9. Girls see physics as for white men only, MPs told"

this is true of mathematics too (math and physics are two sides of same coin)... i minored in high mathematics and got a 3.9 GPA... but i am female, so take a guess how welcome i was at finding support when i was trying to get my master's in math...

many sciences are anti-human in their "teams"... i finally decided that i did not want to conform to that lifestyle anymore.. i spent a year, communicating with 126 faculty members, but could not find a major professor; this fight was literally killing me.... and i withdrew my master's of science application, and applied (and was accepted) to get my master's in history and promptly lost every one of my friends of the field of science...

when i announced on FB that i was accepted to OSU for my History MA, i *literally* had people post outrage ("noooo!") and one woman fought with me through several comments, saying that she was in shock because i was "the best environmental scientist" that she knew...

being gifted in math/science makes you somehow obligated to stay in those fields for the rest of you life...

[nameandnature]

4's definition of "man"/"woman" will do when we don't need or want to know about biology, but adopting it does mean that it wasn't fair to apply the term transphobe to the woman suing the rape crisis centre because they wouldn't put her in a support group which didn't contain men. In that case, the complainant says that she was put in a group with "someone who appeared to be a man", and I think the Twitter thread in 4 is saying it's fair enough that she then reacted to that person as if they were a man.

[andrewducker]

"We have offered the claimant individual 1:1 support, and so far she has not taken us up on this offer. We want to make clear that this offer is still open to the claimant."

Which seems like a reasonable accommodation to provide someone who won't take someone's word for what gender they are.

[nameandnature]

Taking someone's word for it goes beyond what the Twitter thread talks about, though, which is about presentation. Are you saying that a rape victim ought to take someone's word for it about a man (by the definition of the Twitter thread) in their support group?

We have offered the claimant individual 1:1 support, and so far she has not taken us up on this offer.

I'm not sure I agree that's a reasonable accommodation. It depends on whether there's an advantage in being supported as part of a group. I can imagine there might be, but also that 1:1 support might be better for some people. As she'd opted to join the group she presumably preferred it, and it seems odd (and discriminatory) to not provide a single sex group, so I'd support the lawsuit in this case.

[andrewducker]

They certainly ought to take the word of the support center, who will presumably have spoken to this woman and made sure she is who she says she is.

[nameandnature]

What process should the support centre follow to determine that this person is who they say they are?

I don't agree that the complainant should have to take anyone's word for it. A single sex group is an obvious option the centre could have allowed, but they were too doctrinaire to be flexible, and now they'll possibly have to pay out. It's sad as this will presumably impact their ability to provide care to others, a bit like when incompetant NHS hospitals get sued.

[andrewducker]

It is a single sex group.

Trans women are women.

[nameandnature]

I said "sex", not "gender", where I understand the distinction to be biological (sex) vs social (gender). In that sense, it was not a single sex group. Are you using "sex" differently?

I also notice that you didn't answer the question about how the centre itself could determine that the person was who they said there was, so that complainant could trust the centre's word on it. Is that actually a realistic thing for the centre to do?

[andrewducker]

By talking to them and ensuring, insist as possible, that they are coming across as genuine.

And excluding transgender women from support groups is horrific. When the consultation in Scotland happened not one support charity came out in favour of treating them so appallingly.

[nameandnature]

I agree that the centre ought to check the bona-fides of people joining the group (although not that it's reasonable to expect a trauma victim to then go along with it). Wouldn't the centre questioning people's self-identification itself lead to complaints about gate keeping and the like, though? Do we have any evidence the centre did question it in this case?

And excluding transgender women from support groups is horrific

I don't think the complainant wanted there to be no groups with transwomen in. She found the presence of male-presenting people triggering to her PTSD and wanted there to be a group without such people in it. So in that sense, I guess what would have helped her isn't a single sex group (since again, the worry of "how can the centre tell?" comes up) but a female-presenting group: if she hadn't been triggered, there'd have presumably been no problem. There could also be women's groups where the membership is based on self-identification rather than presentation, if all the members were happy with that. In fact, if the centre could manage the admin, I'd support people being allowed to move groups based on anything that was triggering about the group they were in, even if it was something that in other contexts might be seen as an -ism or a -phobia.

Instead the centre valued adherence to doctrine over not triggering the trauma sufferers they're supposed to be helping.

[andrewducker]

Doctrine is excluding transgender women.

Edit: You are using "doctrine" here as if it meant "adhering to a belief system that nobody *really* believes, they just give lip service to in order to not get in trouble." And I want to make it really really clear that not only is that not the case, but I find it a really offensive way to make a point.

[nameandnature]

I'm using doctrine to mean "a belief or set of beliefs, especially political or religious ones, that are taught and accepted by a particular group". There's no implication that they give lip service to them, in fact, it's quite the reverse. It feels like the centre regards a belief like "someone who says they're a woman must be treated as one by us" as a sacred (in Haidt's sense) value. With sacred values, the suggestion that they might be weighed against other values evokes feelings of offense and disgust, like the suggestion that a Catholic church could sell blessed communion wafers and use the money to feed the poor (the wafers are sacred even though feeding the poor is a good thing, as is not triggering the PTSD sufferer).

Going back to the thread, I think Andrew H is right to say that there's a loose cluster of characteristics which cause us to assign a gender to someone we encounter, but don't agree that the most important is what they call themselves. We can't usually look at DNA and genitals, so we mostly look at visible (secondary) sexual characteristics, so I'd say that those were the most important, or at least, most common, way of determining gender. It is making up new definitions to say that's all about DNA and genitals, but it's also making up new definitions to say that self-identification is sufficient. There might be good reasons to accept the new definitions, but that doesn't mean they aren't new.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that makes sense - but in that case of course they're going to prioritise their beliefs about the world. Who priotitises things they don't believe?

And going back to "doctrine over not triggering the trauma sufferers they're supposed to be helping":
They're supposed to be helping women who have survived sexual assaults. Which, according to their beliefs, includes the transgender woman. Excluding some of the people who have traumatised by sexual assault because others are triggered by them feels like something you could work around sometimes, where possible (if you had a group that didn't have any black people in it then you could tell people who had been assaulted by a black person that they could use that group instead). But excluding people for that reason feels entirely against the mission of the organisation to me.

As to the other bit - sure, some people will find women with some facial hair offputting. But they exist. As do tall women. And muscular women. Women come in many shapes and sizes. Should someone with a nasty case of PCOS be excluded from an assault survivors group because she doesn't trim back the moustache it gives her?

[nameandnature]

Reading back, my use o f "doctrine" probably came from the earlier use of "doctrinaire" i.e. inflexible and not pragmatic.

Assuming the number of people wanting a support group is high enough (which, unfortunately, it probably is), it seems possible to arrange multiple groups so that people who won't get on for whatever reason can be in different ones without anyone being excluded from being in a group. That'd be pragmatic.

Suppose the centre were in fact running multiple groups (I'm not sure whether anyone has said whether they were or weren't). The centre's view was that the complainant's reason for not getting along with someone in her group was a bad and wrong reason. Their refusal to put her in another group looks like they valued punishing her for that badness over just putting her in a group which didn't have male-presenting people in it.

The harder case would be when there was only one group (because of limited resources rather than limited demand, presumably). In that case the complainant's case would be a lot weaker, because she's got to argue that her rights should overrule other people's rights to get group support, and why should we think that?

[andrewducker]

Yeah, if someone has trauma around something and there are multiple groups then hopefully they'll be able to accomodate. If there is only one group then that's trickier, and either it'll be down to how many people they'll be denying service to each way, or (as you say) they'll need to make a more principles-based decision.