Referred to
Just a slight misunderstanding.
A transgender woman “deceived” a man into thinking she was a biological female so he would have sexual relations with her, a court has heard.
Ciara Watkin, 21, told the man she was on her period to stop him discovering she was biologically male, prosecutors told Teesside Crown Court…Ms Watkin, who was referred to by female pronouns in court, denies three counts of sexual assault.
He shouldn’t have been referred to by female pronouns in court. Courts shouldn’t allow lying, let alone encourage it or enforce it.
The defendant, who was born male, had used the name Ciara since the age of 13 although had not undergone any medical treatment or surgery, the court heard.
That’s how the BBC is dealing with the pronoun issue now? Just not using any pronoun at all?
The trial hasn’t ended yet.
Correction! “Ciara” was found guilty.
Picture worth a thousand words…more here:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15024745/Trans-woman-concealed-male-genitalia-performing-sex-act-man-guilty-sexual-assault.html
Interesting that team trans’s defence here is that transwomen are male after all — or this particular one at least is — and that there is a clearly visible difference between males and females.
It’s notable that they only ever admit this when it’s advantageous to their side to do so. Still, this is one of those items that’ll make a handy bookmark. It can be deployed to show that transactivists are never consistent in what they profess to believe. They’ll readily change their tune and even completely flip their arguments right around, depending on whatever side benefits them the most.
Interesting, too, that this case establishes that sexual orientation is based on biological sex and not “gender identity”. It didn’t take the jury very long to agree with the prosecution that deception about one’s biological sex can violate people’s deeply-held sexual instincts. I think that principle is very easy for people to grasp and to agree with.
It also goes to highlight how bizarre it is that we still can’t openly state our biological sex-based boundaries on dating apps like Grindr. This ruling says biological sex matters so much that it’s potentially criminal to mislead people about it, but the dating apps’ policies state the opposite — that biological sex is so inconsequential it’s practically criminal to even mention it. Effectively, dating app users are not allowed to reject a sexual advance on the basis of someone’s sex until they’re face-to-face IRL. Within the confines of the apps, they’re obligated to lie, potentially putting both sides in legal danger.
I wonder if that will change…
Wait — I pressed send too toon. Turns out I’ve got more to say about this!
This ruling puts the gay male transgender culture in a bind in another way: it’s all about assimilating into “femaleness” as much as possible, especially for the purposes of gaining sexual attention from males. See, for example, Kim Petras, the gay male transwoman of “Slutpop” fame, whose entire persona consists of bragging about how fuckable he supposedly looks in the eyes of straight men.
See also the actor Hunter Schafer (who I just read about this morning, as he’s been cast in the upcoming Blade Runner TV series). I wrote about him here last year. He wants to be cast in roles that don’t mention his transgender status. But in reality, such “stealth” transness is illegal, once dating and mating become a part of one’s life.
The entire puberty blockers and pediatric gender medicine regime is built upon the total erasure of feminine boys’ biological sex.
But if they’re still legally obligated to inform potential partners of their sex, then what’s the point of all that deception? In this particular case, the fact that the defendant hadn’t had surgeries and hadn’t changed his appearance enough was what their entire defence rested on. The strange corollary of that is that the more transwomen “pass” the more liable they are to be found guilty of sexual assault by deception.
Seemingly, according to this ruling, transwomen always have to disclose to their sex partners that they’re male, which is going to make a lot of them question why they were put through this regime in the first place.
Hmm, there’s a lot to think about here…
Artymorty, thanks for a good rundown of the social aspects of biological sex as it relates to consent to sexual relations. In Britain, where this report comes from, rape by deception is a crime. There’s no similar crime that I know of in North America, but lack of consent is always at the heart of any rape or sexual assault prosecution.
So what do we make of governments aiding and abetting this sort of crime by making it easier for people to deceive others about their sex? Depending where you live, governments will issue passports, driver’s licences, and even revised birth certificates that falsely state a person’s sex. If I were suing someone for sexual assault by deception, and I’d relied on someone’s ID to my detriment, I’d certainly sue the relevant government as well. Did governments even consider this possibility before allowing people to falsify data on their IDs?
That’s a very good question.
That’s an excellent point. I still don’t know much about rape by deception — what counts as criminal deception and what doesn’t, or which countries and jurisdictions have it in their laws. I’ve got some reading to do…
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A funny little tidbit:
Just now I asked ChatGPT about sexual assault by deception. This was my prompt:
It took a whole 4 minutes to think about it, giving me little status updates along the way. US. UK. Australia. Israel. Singapore. HIV. Condom “stealthing”. Marital status. “gender”. All 50 US States. Several famous cases came up. It analyzed it all and gave me a genuinely excellent six-page response.
But here’s the funny bit. I asked it a follow-up question specifically about gender and deception. Then it started churning through sources. As it does this, it shows you little icons of the websites it’s searching as it goes. CNN, BBC, various academic sites, etc. Then an image I recognized came up: my friend Tish, who is a gender-critical commentator (and the first person to “discover” and widely share my channel on YouTube, leading to the podcast and so much drama, both good and bad, for the next four years of my life).
Then suddenly, ChatGPT slammed shut and gave me an error. I retyped my question, and the same thing happened again. Tish broke ChatGPT!
It’s a funny thing, this new AI regime we’re under. If it even touches a blog that’s too “stridently” gender-critical it just snaps shut.
That’s either a testament to our power over it, or to its power over us. I’m not quite sure yet!
Yikes!
ChatGPT’s been like that forever. The model’s rather fervently “progressive”. This makes sense, as Reddit et al formed the bulk of its training corpus, and the human feedback part of its RLHF training heavily skewed toward, let’s say, “gender sensitive” types and devotees of intersectionality. Assumptions of non-binary validity and placing sensitivity & inclusivity ahead of honesty & factual accuracy are baked into its weights and biases.
It’s less bad than it used to be, but it’s still warped and dystopian.