andrewducker | Interesting Links for 19-05-2022

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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.

Edited 2022-05-21 12:22 (UTC)

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.

Edited 2022-05-23 11:25 (UTC)

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?

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?

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.

Interesting Links for 19-05-2022

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