> Your trick is ignoring the stronger argument which is it's very likely that a trans woman will get pregnant after a uterus transplant at some point during our lifetime.
Harvesting the uterus of a woman and hosting it inside a man does not make him a member of a female sex.
Even if a womb was lab-grown somehow, rather than poached, it's highly unlikely his body would be compatible with pregnancy. And there would be massive ethical concerns in performing this experiment, given that this is an attempt to artificially create and grow a new human life in a body fundamentally unsuited to this task.
The only reason that redefinitions such as this are being proposed (and in many places, accepted) is so that some men can claim to be women, and to twist law and policy around such claims.
So, as a consequence of this, we now have men in women's prisons, men in women's sports, men in women's shelters, and so on. Is this really a beneficial concession to be made?
That is disgusting, but sadly not unexpected these days. The elephant in the room is that many 'transwomen' identify as so because of sexual fetishism; these men want to become the pornified image they have of women.
It's easily witnessed in their forums, for example the 'MtF' subreddit, there are countless posts of men asking if it's normal to be sexually aroused while cross-dressing, fetishising their own breasts, talking about their longing to be a 'hot woman', and so on.
"There are several crucial differences between biological and adoptive parents, on the one hand, and transwomen and women, on the other hand. These include:
- that both biological and adoptive parents actually parent, whereas it’s not at all clear what transwomen and women have in common that is supposed to play this same role;
- that there is no historical power relationship between biological and adoptive parents, whereas there is between male and female people;
- that calling adoptive parents parents doesn’t undermine our understanding of what it is to be a parent because what is core to parenting — raising children — is done by both, whereas what is core to being a woman is being female, and that is not done by both;
- there is no established history of adoptive parental violence against biological parents, whereas there is an established history of male violence against women;
- that adoptive parents do have ‘similar enough concerns and interests’ to biological parents, but transwomen do not have these to women (especially considering the heterogeneity among transwomen);
- that there is no ‘oppressive ideological agenda of parenthood’ but there is of being a woman (namely being feminine); and finally,
- that there are many ways to be a bad parent, which we can probably agree on, but there are no ways to be a bad woman."
The statements made by any company representative responding to PR crisis shouldn't be taken as the unvarnished truth. The purpose is reputation management, dampening negative publicity before it overwhelms, while hopefully minimising long-term reputational damage.
Look at it from Cloudflare employees' point of view though. Do they really want to spend their time getting drawn in to any more of this trivial online drama? No, of course not. Pulling the plug is the sensible business decision.
I feel sorry for Cloudflare's management team in having to deal with all this nonsense.
What they really want to focus on is growing their business, developing new cloud-scale technologies, and serving their customers the best they can.
Instead they've ended up stuck in this ridiculous online spat between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals.
If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to observe the sex in most of these cases though, it just takes more than a quick visual check to determine.
The really tricky cases are where the individual has reproductive organs of mixed types, particularly where it involves some sort of genetic mosaicism or chimerism. These ones are where we could reasonably say that sex is only assigned and not observed, but it's very rare. Rarest of all is where someone could be plausibly regarded as both female and male.
Generally, I think it's best to avoid the terminology of "assigned at birth", because it comes with the implication that sex can be arbitrarily reassigned. Something like "incorrectly observed" would be better, in cases where a mistake has genuinely been made.
> Women in prison are sexually assaulted, raped, and even impregnated by men all the time and have been for years. Those men are guards.
Indeed and this is why feminist organizations, and others with an interest in women's rights and safety, push for policies of only employing female prison guards in women's prisons.
It's no stretch to see why they don't want male prisoners to be incarcerated there too, no matter how such males identity.
If the male guards can't be trusted not to sexually abuse women, how can you expect the same from cohabiting males?
> More often than not, when someone has a take like this, it usually means they're a TERF but I can't find anything she's publicly written that's obviously transphobic so I'm scratching my head as to what the actual issue is here.
Sorry the witch hunt didn't work out like you'd hoped.
It doesn't matter that the segregation was originally pushed for with the benefit of male prisoners in mind. If you look at the conditions for women in prison before and after sex segregation, it was an improvement.
We shouldn't be regressing back and allowing men to be incarcerated alongside women again, unless there is a provably good reason for this - which, so far, no-one has demonstrated.
It's all about 'gender identity' these days, not hormones and surgery.
Indeed, in trans circles, expecting the latter as a required factor is often considered highly offensive. This, and the notion that a person needs to experience gender dysphoria to be trans, is now derisively known as the 'truscum' point of view.
So are you advocating for entirely mixed-sex prisons or what? That's an extremely radical view.
An important part of addressing these issues of violence in the prison system has been, up until recently, the segregation of inmates by their sex. This is in addition to other policies regarding the prison environment.
If you want to undo that policy of sex segregation, you should have a very good reason, and proof that it won't cause harm to the sex who, in general, have lesser physical strength and can be impregnated by the other.
Exactly this. Even using the phrase 'trans woman' is a concession, implying that these men are a subcategory of women, rather than of men. And that it's possible to 'trans' into this category.
(This is why in radical feminist circles, they are typically referred to as 'trans-identifying males' instead.)