Transphobia

A new code of practice has said that organisations offering single-sex services and spaces must exclude Trans+ people from them, or no longer label them as ‘single-sex’.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK's equality watchdog, laid the Code of Practice before Parliament this Thursday, May 21st. It sets out that single-sex spaces, from toilets to changing rooms, must be served on the basis of what it calls 'biological sex', based on people's sex assigned at birth. It will come into practice after 40 days, if it is not opposed.

The code makes it clear that this is the case even if someone has a Gender Recognition Certificate that changes their legal sex. It sets out that this should now be considered their 'certified sex', instead of their 'biological sex', and that single-sex provisions must be delivered in accordance with 'biological sex'.

[…]

In almost all instances, it recommends creating 'third spaces' for Trans+ people to use, setting out that though people should use single sex services based on their 'biological sex', if Trans+ people are perceived to be another gender, it may be proportionate to deny them access to these too.

For example, it sets out that if a trans man is perceived to be a man, they could be denied entry to the women's toilets, even though their sex assigned at birth is female. It describes this as "a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim" because "other service users could reasonably object to his presence".

[…]

Although this guidance is not as bad as it could have been, this is horrific news for not only Trans+ people, but the whole LGBTQIA+ community. The Trans+ community are scared, angry and fearful about what it could mean.

Trans+ Solidarity Alliance says this code will become Labour's legacy, haunting them much like Section 28 did the Conservatives. Trans Actual have warned that this will impact everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community.

It will act as a blank cheque for anyone who wants to further narrow what men and women should look like, which will lead to increasingly polarised gender policing in bathrooms, changing rooms and spaces up and down the country.

The lack of self-awareness in naming a site that excludes anyone who isn't a bigoted joyless monomaniac "Giggle" cannot be emphasised enough.

Last week, the Federal Court upheld a 2024 decision that it was discriminatory to exclude a transgender user from a women-only app.

The court had been considering an appeal from Giggle for Girls app founder Sall Grover over the 2024 finding that she discriminated against Roxanne Tickle by blocking her from using the app and refusing to reinstate her.

Grover and Giggle argued the decision to exclude Tickle was exempt from being classed as discrimination because the app aimed to achieve "substantial equality" and create a safe space for women.

On Friday, the Federal Court upheld its decision that the exemption did not apply, meaning similar arguments made in defence of single-sex spaces would likely also fail.

On Saturday, Opposition leader Angus Taylor said in a statement on social media that the finding confirmed "the Australian law does not properly protect single sex spaces for women and girls".

He vowed on social media to amend the Sex Discrimination Act if the Coalition won government, "to ensure that women and girls (and men and boys) have protections based on biological sex".

"We are not removing a single protection from anyone," he said.

"But we are recognising something that should never have been in doubt: biological sex is real, it matters, and women and girls deserve spaces where it is respected."

Taylor said a move to "define biological sex in the Act" as "the sex you are born" would be a first-term priority.

"This is not radical. It is common sense," Taylor said.

Sigh. Yes, we've heard it all before. It's reality that's being excessively radical, therefore we must legislate against reality.

A good account of events around Robin Ince's resignation, and an answer to the obvious question that had been bugging me:

This won't convince everyone, but it is very good:

To the transphobes, “what is a woman?” is never treated as a serious question. It is only a rhetorical device meant to “own the libs” or whatever. This is a shame, because it’s an excellent question. As a trans woman myself, I love this question because if treated seriously, it yields some surprising and uplifting insights into the nature of identity itself.

So that’s what we’re going to do today: take it seriously. And for the sake of clarity, the rest of this article will refer to “what is a woman?” as The Question.

If you took any philosophy classes in college, you may recognize The Question as fundamentally an ontological one. It is a question about categories, which are sufficiently interesting that an entire branch of philosophy dedicates itself to examining them and how they work.

[…]

The broad strokes of ontology are about how categories are defined and how you determine which things in the world do or don’t belong to a given category. In that sense, The Question is clearly ontological because it implicitly posits that a category called “women” exists, and then asks for a definition of that category.

Why? Because we would presumably like to have a rigorous way of knowing which people belong to that category and which do not. That is, we would like to be able to use that definition in a social context to do useful things like decide who gets to marry whom, who gets to use which bathroom, and who might get sent off to fight in foreign wars.

Keen readers will observe that there is a circularity problem here: to define a category, we must examine members of that category to see what traits they have. But without an a-priori definition of the category, how do we know that the things we’re examining actually belong to the category? Ontologists take a variety of approaches to this circularity problem. The ones that are most relevant for our purposes are prototype theory and iterative refinement.

Prototype theory takes the existence of the category itself for granted and builds a definition of the category around uncontroversial examples. If examining the category of “birds”, the prototype theorist more or less says, “look, we’re not sure about penguins, but we all agree that crows and robins and sparrows are birds, so let’s just start there, ok?”

Iterative refinement takes a prospective category definition and refines it by examining additional candidate members of the category, to see whether they should be rejected from the category or whether the category definition itself should be refined to properly recognize them. The iterative refiner says “Ok, so penguins don’t fly, but they do lay eggs. Should we refine the category definition to exclude flying as a necessary attribute, or should we reject penguins from the category of birds?” And they probably decide to exclude flying from the definition, because a broken-winged sparrow is still a bird.

The Australian Christian Lobby has sent an election mail out in Victoria, spreading transphobia and trying to discredit The Greens.

Residents of the City of Yarra and Moreland City Councils contacted QNews after they received transphobic election material.

It arrived in their letterbox the day after Trans Day of Visibility.

The pamphlet from the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) was titled: “Male and Female Matter”.

It states that the Greens are “experimenting with biology at your expense”.

“Male and female matter, The Greens don’t agree,” the pamphlet read.

Siting that “while you wait for urgent medical care, The Greens want to use your tax dollars for free gender transition surgeries”.

The pamphlet also says that the Greens wish to put more gender clinics in hospitals while emergency departments are in crisis.

Just putting this here until it's superseded by something even more ridiculous.

In an interview Sunday on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures, Alabama Senator and former football coach Tommy Tuberville claimed that “entire men’s teams… women’s teams are turning trans.” Tuberville previously served as the primary sponsor of a national transgender sports ban, which was defeated in the U.S. Senate earlier this year. The senator offered no evidence for his incendiary claim, and to date, there is no documented instance of “entire teams” identifying as transgender. His remarks follow a string of increasingly exaggerated claims from Republicans and President Trump about the presence of transgender people in sports and schools.

“Entire men’s teams across this country now that are turning trans… women’s teams that are turning trans. That’s going to be a situation now where it is going to pick up speed, because these woke globalists are pushing these kids to say, ‘if you can’t compete in men’s sports, let’s just transition to say you’re a woman and participate in women’s sports.’ It is dead wrong, and we’ve got to stand up against it, but the Democrats… they’re all in of keeping this situation going in the wrong direction,” Tuberville said. The host offered no pushback, nodding and replying “yeah” during the segment, failing to fact-check the baseless claims.

Every fascist movement needs a group of people to blame all the bad things in the world on. Obviously, this is a highly dangerous situation to said people, and they might need to flee the country. This is a small project trying to help them within the bounds of what we can do.

This is more than a bit clickbaity, but the punchline is rather sweet.`

After stewing about this for my entire six-hour flight, I finally made it to San Francisco. When I exited the subway at Union Square, I walked past a seriously tattooed, jacked-up dude who immediately began ranting at me with his bullhorn.

“How dare you blaspheme the Lord with your appearance!” he screamed while his two buddies/bodyguards and a handful of passersby stopped to laugh (although not at him).

“You were not meant to remove parts of you your body that the Lord designed just for you, so you could go forth and procreate!”

I started to argue that he was thinking of the wrong body part I planned on losing in San Francisco, but that was a trans rookie mistake. Never engage.

He launched into the classic, “only mentally ill people don’t know the difference between men and women” tirade as I slipped away. However, that was when a woman asked me for change. I politely declined and kept moving, only to be serenaded by her piercing, “You fuckin’ trannies! You can’t fool me! You should be ashamed!”

A really comprehensive roundup:

In 2018, a physician and researcher named Lisa Littman published a paper in the journal PLOS One describing what she termed “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD). She hypothesized that some young people—particularly those assigned female at birth—might claim a transgender identity after increasing their social media use or befriending trans peers. According to this perspective, online platforms supposedly “infect” teenagers with the idea that they are trans, creating clusters of youth who suddenly identify in new ways.

From the moment Littman’s paper appeared, researchers and advocacy groups criticized its methodology. Littman’s survey collected responses solely from parents recruited on three websites openly skeptical or critical of medical care for trans youth. These anti-trans or “trans-skeptical” forums—4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend, and Youth Trans Critical Professionals—advertised Littman’s survey to parents who already believed their child’s trans identity was misguided. Unsurprisingly, 76.5% of respondents felt their child was “incorrect” in identifying as transgender.

Critics also pointed out that the youth themselves were never surveyed. Parents who participated were asked to diagnose their children with gender dysphoria (a clinical term referring to distress due to a mismatch between one’s internal sense of gender and assigned sex at birth), even though most parents do not have training in psychology or medicine.

[…]

Although Littman’s original 2018 article used the term ROGD, many discussions in conservative blogs and online groups substituted or conflated it with “transgender social contagion.” This idea claims that trans identity spreads from teen to teen like a virus—an online trend rather than a real expression of self.

While the ROGD paper didn’t use the “social contagion” phrase outright, it alluded to the concept through references to “peer influence” and social media immersion. Almost immediately, these concepts were embraced by anti-trans activists, policymakers, and media personalities. The theory gave them a sort of “scientific” veneer to argue that trans kids are just “confused.” As a result, many now simply refer to both ROGD and “transgender social contagion” interchangeably, even though they are (at least in Littman’s framing) slightly different.

I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked!

The researchers found that respondents who viewed female athletes as less deserving of attention, support, and media coverage were more likely to oppose transgender inclusion in sports. For example, individuals who disagreed with statements like “Women’s sports deserve the same amount of media coverage as men’s sports” were significantly less likely to support transgender athletes’ rights.

The researchers also found that adherence to traditional standards of femininity—such as prioritizing thinness and attractiveness—was a strong predictor of opposition to transgender athlete inclusion. For instance, respondents who endorsed the idea that women should be thin or that women’s muscles were less attractive were less supportive of transgender athletes competing in alignment with their gender identity.

Similarly, those who agreed with statements like “Female athletes will never be as good as male athletes” were more likely to oppose allowing transgender athletes to compete according to their gender identity and to support sex testing.

Negative attitudes toward homosexuality were another powerful predictor of opposition to transgender athletes’ rights. Participants who expressed homophobic views, such as agreeing with statements like “I would be disappointed if I found out my child was homosexual,” were significantly more likely to support sex testing and oppose transgender inclusion.

According to the researchers, the findings suggest that opposition to transgender inclusion often reflects efforts to uphold traditional gender norms and maintain the existing gender order rather than a genuine commitment to advancing women’s sports.