Maybe she’s a frog?
Nice title.
I can’t even be sure of my own sex, equalities officer tells tribunal
An equalities officer who advised that a transgender doctor should be allowed to use a hospital’s female changing room has said she cannot be sure of her own biological sex.
Isla Bumba told an employment tribunal that the definition of biological sex was “far more complex” than whether someone had a male or female body.
She is very young, she is NHS Fife’s equality and human rights lead officer, and she is paid far more than Sandie Peggie is.
Ms Bumba also told the tribunal, brought by nurse Sandie Peggie, that she did not need to “know anything” about the body of Dr Beth Upton, who was born male, before advising that the medic should be given access to the female changing room.
So the body is wholly irrelevant is it? The fact that Upton is huge and Peggie is not just doesn’t matter? Upton’s genitalia don’t matter? And this state of affairs is our new utopia?
Transgender women presented less of a threat to females than ordinary men, she argued, saying the only case she was aware of that suggested otherwise was that of the trans rapist Isla Bryson.
No no no, Bryson is not a trans rapist, he’s a real rapist. He’s a real rapist who claims to be a woman, adding insult to injury yet again.
Ms Bumba said she sought guidance from other health boards about their practices before she issued the advice about Dr Upton, as NHS Fife did not have a policy. She said there was a “pretty wide consensus” that trans staff should be allowed to use facilities that aligned with their self-identified gender.
However, she admitted that she had not considered the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, which state that separate communal changing and lavatory facilities must be provided for male and female workers.
Well of course she hadn’t. 1992!! Be serious. You might as well expect her to consider regulations from 1892.
Pressed by Ms Cunningham that she had denied biological women a “genuine single-sex space for changing”, Ms Bumba said: “I’m not sure I agree with your definition of biological sex in that sense. I think you’ve simplified what could be deemed biological sex, but in actual fact, it’s far more complex.”
So it’s not biological sex, it’s something far more complex than that? Which would be…what? Exactly?
If I understand her correctly, what she seems to be saying is that it is indeed about biological sex, but sex itself is too complicated and messy to allow any definitive statements about who qualifies as biologically “female” and who does not. If so it fits nicely with the prediction I made back in April. I still suspect that this will be the next line of attack.
Or to put it another way she’s just bullshitting.
She may not know she’s bullshitting, she may think she’s up to date and Naomi Cunningham is some pathetic fossil who is unaware that science has moved on from the crude categories of yesteryear.
Meaning she consulted a bunch of other people as ideologically blinkered and belligerent as she is, who think that the existence of dawn and dusk means there’s no such thing as “day” and “night”, and who take their own sloppy, careless, pop-sci confusion over the wave/particle duality of light to mean that, despite the clearly written rules of the road, they are exempt from ever have to turn on their headlights.
I think she should leave biology to the biologists. It isn’t that complex, other than the fact that many of us may not now (or never did) meet one or two of the several criteria. Yes, you can be a woman if you don’t have a uterus, but that doesn’t mean a non-uterus-haver with testicles, a penis, and XY chromosomes can be a woman. THAT’S the mistake they make.
The definition of a dog includes having four legs. If a dog has only three legs, but they meet the other criteria for being considered a dog, they are still a dog.
Women understand that. We don’t throw someone out of the ladies room because they had a hysterectomy (how the hell would we know, without some sort of arm band or something?). We don’t throw them out because they are no longer menstruating (we just envy them). Yet they act like a biological definition would remove all these women from the bathroom designated for women. They have to do that. If they didn’t, they might have to admit that women are not being exclusive…of other women. Having to admit they are men, and have no rights in the ladies room, horrifies them beyond anything that has ever horrified them. The Holocaust? Pshaw, nothing compared to being called ‘he’. The plague? Forget that, have you ever been turned away from the ladies dressing room, in spite of having two gowns over your male shoulders? The pandemic? FGM? Women dying in menstruation huts? Women being stoned for being raped? Women having to wear bags? Man up, girls, you’ve NOTHING to complain about compared to having to pee in the men’s room.
I’m totally sick of their bullshit. It appears a lot of other people are getting that way, too…people who would never have heard their bullshit if they weren’t so intent on invading all women’s boundaries, leaving no woman anywhere feeling safe and comfortable in the restroom with the triangle-person on the door.
But what’s the point of having a female changing room?
In order to replace sex with gender identity in a given context, you need to explain two things:
1) Why sex does not matter the aforementioned context;
2) Why gender identity does matter.
“Sex is muddled and mysterious and almost impossible to figure out” would take care of point 1) if it were true. But that still leaves point 2). This is almost always the case – we never seem to get a complete argument from these people. Bumbling around the meaning and implications of sex doesn’t get us anywhere close to explaining what gender identity has to do with washrooms, changing rooms, sports, and so on. At the most, it could be used to justify not having separate changing rooms, but that’s not what’s happening here.
This, alone, shows how inept she is at her job. There’s ample actual evidence of transwomen posing a threat to women, particularly in areas that are meant to be women-only. Anyone else remember the hospital that insisted a victim couldn’t have been raped, ‘because there were no men on the ward’? Or the eight allegations of sexual assault by transwomen inmates in California jails?
As far as I can tell the argument that biological sex is far too complex to determine at a glance whether somone is male or female boils down to the 0.002 – 0.005% of the male population that have Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). This tiny minority are male, but appear to be female. They are infertile and go through life passing as women and thinking they are women. Many marry, but as infertility is reasonably common only a few are ever diagnosed as CAIS. This is hardly justification for claiming that you’re unsure of your own sex as if you appear female and have periods, you have a uterus, which means you’re not CAIS for starters.
These people muddy the waters with their insistence on perfect definitions they would never accept elsewhere.
Imagine your car (per definition a means of transportation with wheels) is at the mechanic and he removes all the wheels to change them. Since the car does not have wheels right now, do they cry “Where is my car?”
Definitions have a core – a set of entities that we have to agree upon that belongs to the group being defined. For women, this would contain all “people being able to get pregnant”, for men it would contain all “people being able to produce sperm”. Starting from that, we extend the groups so that the distinction is made in the way that us most clear and useful and best agrees with what we observe in physical reality. Therefore we add women after menopause or women who are infertile to the group of women, and infertile men to the group of men etc.
Arguing that two groups cannot be defined because there are some borderline cases is like arguing that day and night cannot be distinguished because there is no exact point in time when day becomes night. I wrote about this (in German) some time ago here:
https://scienceblogs.de/hier-wohnen-drachen/2022/05/02/die-parabel-von-achilles-und-der-schildkroete/
Of course, TRAs try to muddy the waters further by claiming “but the biological possibility of getting pregnant is irrelevant in everday life, so society should use a definition that works better in our society.” That, actually, would be a good argument if we lived in a utopia without misogyny, without women being exploited for sex, put to the male gaze, exploited for surrogacy, put in menstruation huts, being stigmatized for being women etc. Unfortunately, we don’t, and your biological sex colors almost every interaction you have in society.
As long as that is the case, we need clear concepts of biological sex and if you are unable to determine even your own sex, you have no business being even remotely involved in an equality office.
YNnB #3
Sonderval #8
It’s worse than that, though. At least day and night are on a real continuum (sort of*). That still doesn’t make it a good argument, of course: Just because there is no precise number x such that having x hairs on your head definitely makes you “bold” while x+1 does not, it doesn’t follow that Slash is no less “bold” than Patric Steward. It’s actually very hard to come up with anything analogous to the “sex spectrum” fallacy. The best I have been able to think of so far would be to insist that there is no justification for saying that that coinflip came up heads rather than tails because very occasionally a coin will land on the edge.
*I guess the least arbitrary place to “draw the line” is when the sun appears over/disappears under the horizon.
The article in the Telegraph about Ms. Bumba, before the tribunal reconvened, is absolutely full of inaccurate and, frankly, cult-like language. This bit particularly irked me. They persistently misrepresent the Supreme Court ruling, don’t they?
If the writer were being honest and reporting facts, that should read as follows:
And once again notice the double standard: If biological sex isn’t this platonic ideal, if there is any fuzziness around the edges, that automatically invalidates any talk of biological sexes as distinct, identifiable categories, but if the alleged “gender” differences they’re are talking about are so vacuous and ill defined that most TRAs don’t even try to come up with a non-circular definition, that apparently makes them more firmly established than the laws of thermodynamics.
If defining “man” and “woman” in terms of physical traits doesn’t meet their standards of simplicity and clearcutness, you definitely wouldn’t expect any of the circular non-definitions in terms of thoughts / feelings / “identity” / “presentation” / “an inner sense of self” etc. to meet those very same standards.
But as always the standards are whatever they have to be to get to the fixed, pre-determined conclusion. I have called it the “Gender of the Gaps” fallacy: If the Biological Sex Model doesn’t meet this impossible standard, the Gender Identity Model wins by default, without having to meet any standards at all. Once again, it’s more or less analogous to saying that “I get to claim for free what you have to pay for”.