At Psychology Today, Michael Moscolo explains that identity isn’t something we can determine all by ourselves. He starts with Yaniv’s ball-waxing caper.

Yaniv’s actions should not be taken to be representative of transgender individuals. Nonetheless, Yaniv’s actions illustrate the deep conceptual problems that arise when we think of gender a form of “self-identification.” I want to show that regardless of one’s views on transgender issues, it is an error to think that gender identity—or any other identity for that matter—[i]s something that can be completely determined by one’s self.

…

These actions underscore the problem of using self-identification as the sole criterion on which to establish a person’s gender identity.  Although Yaniv identifies her gender as a woman, Yaniv’s biological sex is male.

In an individualist society, we prize the values of freedom, autonomy, equality and self-determination. We believe that people should be free to pursue their own agendas, to become whomever they wish to become, provided that they do not hurt others along the way.

Well, yes and no. Yaniv isn’t the only kind of “no”; Trump is another clear example. Trump “identifies as” all kinds of things that he emphatically is not, and he became president of the US partly by doing that, as well as partly by stealing, cheating, pussy-grabbing, racism-spouting, and other deplorable actions. I don’t think people should be free to do that. I think Some Restrictions May (and should) Apply.

From this view, it is easy to see how we might want to sanction the idea that gender—one’s experience of self as man or woman, masculine or feminine, as non-binary, or even non-sexed—as something that a person defines for oneself.  But this is neither true of transgender identities nor of any other type of psychological or social identity.

I do not and cannot create my identity by myself.  Identities are created in interactions that occur between people using public as well as personal criteria. Like it or not, I cannot establish an identity by myself; it must be negotiated with and validated in my relations with others. This does not mean that I have no role in establishing my identity—it simply means that I cannot and do not do so by myself.

You can have a fantasy by yourself. You can have a fantasy about yourself by yourself. That’s possible, and it makes conceptual sense. But the minute you start trying to impose your fantasy about yourself on other people, the Some Restrictions start to Apply. You can’t force us to believe your personal fantasies. It won’t work and it isn’t right. It isn’t possible and it isn’t a reasonable demand. Here’s the good news: the same applies to you. You don’t have to believe my fantasies about myself, either.

Mascolo chooses politics as his not very useful example – you can say you’re a Democrat but then if you vote and talk Republican, etc. It’s not very useful because it’s already purely external and social as well as voluntary. Better examples are race, nationality, and the like, or skilled occupations that can’t be just picked up in a moment.

The point here is not that one’s personal experience is irrelevant to one’s identity—it is indeed foundational. The point is that it is simply not sufficient. We need more than what someone says in order to establish and verify an identity.  We need to be able to point to public and shareable expressions of the person’s experience in order to verify the person’s identity. A person can claim an identity as a Democrat, but without voting for Democrats, espousing Democratic principles and acting on those principles, a person’s self-identification has no warrant.

Or, more usefully, a person can claim an identity as an immigrant or a lawyer, but without actually being either of those things what are we even talking about?

Originally a comment by iknklast on No, please, Geoff, tell us more.

I’m not sure what the problem is understanding this. (1) It is a stock photo. (2) It has the standard set up of a photo with both men and women, where the man dominates the photo and women are subordinate. (3) There are different possible ways of reading the photo. These seem to be agreed on.

The problem isn’t whether the photographer intended a sexist message. It isn’t with whether everyone in the world sees this particular photo with a sexist message. It isn’t even with the fact that in many ways, this is probably a reasonably realistic portrayal of one small moment in time.

The problem is the fact that pictures, movies, stage plays, works of art, literature, textbooks, news articles, etc, are overwhelmingly (1) dominated by males, with (2) females in subordinate positions. It is a build up of message after message after message, and it normalizes that view of things to the extent that people can argue (perhaps in good faith) like Skeletor and Nullius above that there is no overt sexism seen in the picture. For most people, this one single image looks like a small hill to die on, even if they accept the picture as being a dominant male and subordinate female. Well, things like that can happen at least sometimes in a perfect world, right? The male talking? Him sitting in comfort? The women backgrounded and in listening mode? It doesn’t have to be a problem.

But…it is merely one point in a wash of similar images that surround us nearly non-stop, messages that our brain takes in without recognizing them, normalizing conditions that privilege men over women and give our brain instructions that this is how the world works. In a world where women and men enjoyed true equality, and gained equal respect for hard won skills, this picture would not be a problem, and Skeletor and Nullius would be right.

In the world we actually live in, however, this stuff needs to be pointed out, dealt with, and discussed honestly, not by treating the picture as a stand alone, non-threatening object. Because it doesn’t exist alone, it exists in context with millions of other pictures that we want to deal with individually because it is easier than trying to deal with the problem at the root.

The wall is paid for!

A billion won’t cover it though – I guess that’s just an installment? Needs to be eleventy billion at least.

R. McKinnon, Assistant Professor of Philosophy linking to the Pink News article on woman-hating vandalism at Vancouver Rape Relief:

There’s a high likelihood that they’re doing it themselves to drum up more anti-trans hate and fear.

Hours later he was tweeting about hate mail he got from Breitbart readers.

What just happened to the Bahamas? There will be more of it.

While the science has yet to come in on the specifics of just how much worse climate change made Dorian, we already know enough to say that warming worsened the damage. Because it’s not a coincidence that Dorian was one of the strongest landfalling storms ever recorded in the Atlantic, with the strongest sustained peak winds east of Florida, and the strongest ever to hit the Bahamas. This comes less than a year after Florida withstood the first landfalling category 5 hurricane in decades, on 5 October – the latest ever in the season for a storm that strong.

On a basic physics level, we know that warm waters fuel hurricanes, and Dorian was strengthened by waters well above average temperatures. The fact that climate change has heated up our oceans means Dorian was stronger than it would have been had we not spent the past 150 years dumping carbon pollution into the atmosphere. Sea surface temperatures were more than 1C warmer in the region where Dorian formed and strengthened than they were before we started burning fossil fuels.

And the air is warmer too, and warmer air holds more moisture, which turns to torrents of rain in monster storms.

And we know that as climate change has melted glaciers and ice around the world, that water has gone into the oceans. The extra water, along with the expansion of water as it’s warmed, means that sea levels have been raised. That means when a storm like Dorian makes landfall, there’s more water for its storm surge, already bolstered by stronger winds, to push further inland.

All that extra water makes hurricanes even more deadly, since it’s generally not the wind but the water that kills people. So although Dorian’s 220mph gusts were incredibly dangerous (and sped up thanks to climate change), it was the 20-plus feet of storm surge and torrential rains that were the most destructive elements.

And neither one is something you actually want battering a small island.

Also hurricanes are getting worse more quickly and then staying put longer – worst of both worlds.

Had Dorian been moving at a regular pace of a few miles an hour, the devastation in the Bahamas would have been much less severe. But because it sat in place, basically stationary, the damage has been catastrophic. Again, Dorian is far from unique in moving slowly, as a study last year found a 10% decrease in speed for storms like this globally, while a similar study found a 17% decrease along the east coast of the US. While neither of these studies directly tie that slowdown to climate change, the theory that climate change is changing the jet stream in ways that would lead to stalling storms (a phenomenon one of us has researched) is growing increasingly convincing.

When all these factors combine in one storm, as it has for Dorian, it is truly a nightmare scenario – and a preview of the climate crisis to come. The only question is whether we have the foresight to address it.

Some of us do, but the ones in power, nope.

No, Morgane Oger is not Martin Luther King, and the “rights” he is talking about are not comparable to the rights King was talking about, and the civil rights struggle is not Oger’s struggle to steal for his own purposes.

Opposing civil rights legislation or decisions is, in fact, dissenting from a society’s ethical and moral frameworks.

That’s not you, Morgane. That crowd is not a crowd of men who say they are women. There is no “right” for men to be accepted as women. That’s not how the word “rights” is understood. That’s not the dream King had that day.

Her name is Chanel Miller.

She was known as Emily Doe when her victim impact statement, read out in the sexual assault trial of Brock Turner, went viral.

Now, she has revealed her identity as 27-year-old Chanel Miller as she prepares to have her memoir published.

The case sparked controversy when Turner, then a Stanford University student, was sentenced to six months in jail. He served three.

Ms Miller’s book, Know My Name, is being released later this month.

Yes but swimmer. He’s a swimmer. That matters more than some mere woman.

In 2016, a jury would find Turner – then 20 – guilty of three charges: sexually assaulting an intoxicated victim, sexually assaulting an unconscious victim[,] and attempting to rape her. He was sentenced to six months and three years’ probation. Prosecutors had sought a six-year sentence.

…

While writing Know My Name, published on 24 September by Viking, she found out further details of her own case, through court documents and witness statements she had not had access to during the trial.

The case happened before the #MeToo movement, but Ms Miller – who started writing her book in 2017 – added to her memoir and expanded its scope as the spotlight was shone on sexual violence.

I have to say, I don’t know why #MeToo is treated as some sort of Official Landmark of when we started taking sexual violence against women seriously. I was taking it seriously long before #MeToo, and so were millions of other women. I had plenty to say about Brock Turner at the time.

The dogmatic certainty argument for god:

Jesus and Mo on Patreon

The ACLU gets the whole thing completely wrong and backward, starting with the headline.

A New York Jail Forced a Trans Woman Into a Men’s Facility

As opposed to what, ACLU? As opposed to forcing women to deal with a man in their facility.

Jena Faith’s experience in the Steuben County Jail was a living nightmare.

The military veteran spent four weeks in the jail awaiting trial last spring. She was initially housed in the jail’s women’s facility without incident, but things changed when officials suddenly transferred her to the men’s facility, despite the fact that she is a woman.

But he’s not a woman, so there is no “fact” that he’s a woman. He’s a man who wants to be or identifies as or presents as or thinks of himself as a woman.

And how confident can we be that his being housed in the jail’s women’s facility was really “without incident,” given the ACLU’s appalling blindness to the needs of women? How confident can we be that even assuming it was without overt or violent incident, all the women locked up with this man were perfectly at ease with the situation?

During the weeks that Jena spent as a woman in a men’s jail, she was routinely targeted with physical and verbal harassment from other incarcerated people and guards. On her first day in the men’s facility, a fellow incarcerated person started touching her body and blowing kisses at her, making her feel scared and uncomfortable.

If that’s true it’s bad. Jails should prevent physical and verbal harassment by guards or inmates or both. It doesn’t follow however that the women in the jail should pay the price for men’s physical and verbal harassment.

On August 22, the New York Civil Liberties Union, along with the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund and the law firm BakerHostetler, filed a lawsuit on behalf of Jena. It argues that what happened to her is a violation of numerous state laws designed to protect the rights, dignity, and humanity of trans people.

What about the rights, dignity, and humanity of women? Why does Jena’s fantasy identity trump all those women’s actual literal physical sex, which makes them a target of men? Why does the ACLU think that the way to protect a man who says he’s a woman from violent men is to force women to protect him? What if it turns out that he’s a danger to them? How can the ACLU possibly be so sure that will never be the case?

While Jena’s experience was harrowing, it’s not unique. Across the state, trans people are often held in jail and prison facilities that are not consistent with their gender, even though state law prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and courts have held that it’s discriminatory to refuse to treat a person consistently with their gender identity.

How many trans men are there who clamor to be housed with the men? Any? Any at all?

If you were a trans man would you clamor to be housed with the men? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Why? Because I’d expect to be toast if I were so housed. (That shouldn’t be the case. Jails shouldn’t be dangerous for the inmates. The solution however is not to make women the shields.)

In part because they are housed incorrectly, trans people are exposed to overwhelming levels of abuse and harassment while behind bars, and they are far more likely than cisgender people to be targeted for the worst types of violence and mistreatment.

Trans people? Or trans women only? I suspect it’s the latter, and I suspect the ACLU does this trick knowingly.

Meanwhile have a bit of Geneva Convention:

Geneva Convention III
Article 25, fourth paragraph, and Article 29, second paragraph, of the 1949 Geneva Convention III provide that in any camps in which men and women prisoners are accommodated together, separate dormitories and conveniences shall be provided for women.
Geneva Convention III
Article 97, fourth paragraph, and Article 108, second paragraph, of the 1949 Geneva Convention III provide that women prisoners of war undergoing disciplinary punishment or convicted of an offence shall be confined in separate quarters from men and shall be under the immediate supervision of women.
Geneva Convention IV
Article 76, fourth paragraph, of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV provides that women accused of an offence “shall be confined in separate quarters and shall be under the direct supervision of women”.

Maybe in his head Jena Faith genuinely thinks he’s a woman, but whether he does or not, women still have the right to be safe from him.

Sorry to fuss about details but honestly. A woman writes a piece for Inside Higher Education about the desuetude of the faculty lounge, and the tweet promoting it looks like:

A professor laments the widespread disappearance of the faculty lounge (opinion)

Bonnie J. Morris laments the widespread disappearance of a traditional campus oasis.

Come on. Academics are supposed to be hip to semiotics, aren’t they? Which should include people who work at Inside Higher Ed? That picture could be worse only if the women were crouched on the floor covering their heads.

First of all the guy is in the middle, facing outward, so our eyes are drawn to him as if on a string. Then he’s holding his arms out and has an ankle propped on the other knee – he’s taking up space, he’s relaxed, he’s the master of ceremonies. Third, he’s talking. Fourth, he’s the only one talking. Fifth, he’s flanked by two women, both facing him and listening submissively while he kicks back and tells them what’s what. Sixth, they’re not doing anything – they’re in suspended animation, watching him perform. Seventh he’s much older than they are.

No doubt there’s more; feel free to add.

It wouldn’t be so annoying if it weren’t a woman who wrote the piece, but it is, so it is.

Headline:

Brexit: Boris Johnson defeated as MPs take control

Tory rebels and opposition MPs have defeated the government in the first stage of their attempt to pass a law designed to prevent a no-deal Brexit.

The Commons voted 328 to 301 to take control of the agenda, meaning they can bring forward a bill seeking to delay the UK’s exit date.

In response, Boris Johnson said he would bring forward a motion for an early general election.

Jeremy Corbyn said the bill should be passed before an election was held.

In total, 21 Tory MPs, including a number of ex-cabinet ministers, joined opposition parties to defeat the government.

After the vote, Downing Street said those Tory MPs who rebelled would have the whip removed, effectively expelling them from the parliamentary party.

Race ya off the cliff!

No.

R. McKinnon says:

Show your support for trans and intersex athletes: #SportIsAHumanRight shirts, tanks, hoodies, leggings, and more!

The trouble is, what McKinnon means by “support for trans and intersex athletes” here is support for men who want to compete against women. He means men like him, who couldn’t win anything racing with other men, but has won medals by racing with women. So, no. Not going to show any support for that shit.

The New Zealand feminist magazine Broadsheet posted Jill Abigail’s article on Facebook so we all get to read it after all.

Jill Abigail’s post on NZ Green Party politics on trans rights versus women’s rights has in fact been removed from the Te Awa website where it was first posted. So here please find the full text of that original piece.

Solutions that are fair to everyone? JILL ABIGAIL

I am writing a personal response to Jan Logie’s words in the last Te Awa, where she says: “We continue to push for progress on LGBTQI+ freedoms, and resist the backlash that’s trying to undermine our trans and gender diverse whanau and roll back their hard-won rights”.

Who is the “we” in this statement? Is it the Rainbow Greens? I am a lesbian, supposedly under their umbrella, but I am part of the backlash. Is it the whole Green Party? I am a long-time Greens member, but I am part of the backlash. If the Greens caucus is acting on policy that feelings of gender identity over-ride biological sex, then some of us older feminists in the party have strong concerns about its implications.

Transpeople are a vulnerable group that until recently has been excluded from general consideration and now justly claim their right to be treated with equal respect. However, the hard-won rights Jan alludes to include those of male-bodied trans-women to be treated just like natal women and allowed to enter any space or role designated as females-only. Trans rights activists argue that if a man says he feels like a woman, he is one. Women must accept him as one of them, even when he retains his male bodily features.

Many feminists are concerned to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls, whose disadvantaged position under patriarchy is based exactly on our biology and whose primary problem is male violence. Hence sex-based rights include the right to female-only spaces and activities. But feminist analysis of patriarchy seems to be completely lacking in gender ideology. Indeed, feminists who have worked for decades to achieve the rights now enjoyed by younger women are being vilified.

I am horrified by what is happening overseas: the shutting down of free speech; the silencing and abuse of academic experts; young children being taught they can be in the ’wrong’ body, thus reinforcing stereotypes; women’s refuges and rape crisis centres no longer safe sanctuaries; lesbians being accused of transphobia if they insist on same-sex relationships; male-bodied athletes entering women’s sports and taking the prizes; the very language changing to erase females/women, in the name of ‘inclusiveness’.

In New Zealand, meeting venues and publicity have been denied to gender-critical feminists, who are accused – sometimes very violently – of hate speech. The Abortion Law Reform Association now speaks of “pregnant people”, not “pregnant women”. Wellington Lesbian Radio has changed its name because ‘lesbian’ is not “inclusive”. Most serious of all is the medicalisation of children. I recently met a woman who had taken her 11-year-old daughter to a doctor because of a sore throat. The daughter is a tomboy, with short hair. The doctor asked the mother if she wanted the girl to go on puberty blockers. An 11-year-old goes to the doctor with a sore throat and is given a suggestion of puberty blockers?

Gender-critical feminists have allies among some transpeople themselves, who see this ideology as a misogynist, homophobic, men’s rights push. No previous extensions of human rights for new groups have involved taking away the rights of others needing protection. It would be progressive of the Greens to be working for solutions that are fair to everyone, rather than reinforcing the current divide.