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gjm comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong
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"I understand that you find it upsetting, but our policy here is that trans people get to use the changing rooms corresponding to the gender they identify with. If Ms X was staring at your breasts, that was well out of order regardless of gender and I will be happy to speak to her about it and make it clear that that behaviour is unacceptable. If you are troubled by Ms X's genitals, then I can only suggest that you try to ignore them."
Maybe some of them leave and never come back, or set the lawyers on me. No one ever said that doing the right thing is guaranteed to be maximally profitable or keep you out of legal trouble.
Alternatively: "Oh, I think Ms X must have misunderstood our policy, which is actually that she should be using the women's toilets but that to avoid the kind of discomfort you're suffering -- for which I am very sorry -- our members are asked to use the changing rooms corresponding to their anatomy regardless of gender identity. I'll talk with Ms X and see that that's understood."
(The question I answered was about women's bathrooms -- where the partial nakedness is generally confined to individual cubicles -- rather than gym changing rooms where more difficult issues arise. I do, as it happens, prefer the first answer above to the second, but I think either is defensible.)
And of course the same argument goes the other way. The same pre-op trans woman turns up at the gym and you show her to the men's locker room and showers. Soon after that a lot of men come along and complain that there's a woman in their locker room staring at their dicks. (They may use a word more specific and ruder than "woman".) Now what?
The fundamental difficulty here is that gym changing facilities are designed on the assumption that people can be neatly partitioned into two groups, either of which is happy being naked around others in that group. This falls down in the presence of trans people, and doesn't cope too well with the existence of gay people. So any policy you adopt may have problems when someone of non-majority gender or sexuality turns up. The options are: close all the gyms; make them single-sex; provide changing facilities that let people isolate themselves while naked; exclude anyone whose appearance might disturb others; accept that some people are going to be disturbed from time to time. None of these is problem-free. Too bad.
Which answer, do you think, a sufficiently representative poll of women would pick?
Would you also prefer the first answer in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood? ;-)
I don't know. Speaking of solutions, two come to mind. One is to have a few individual showers/changing rooms. They are usually called "family rooms" and are lockable as the intent is that they are used by a single family, often with small kids. The other one is provide three kinds of changing rooms: male, female, and unisex (aka anything goes).
By the way, at least one gym that I know has five kinds of changing rooms: males over 18 only, males if you are or are accompanying someone under 18; the same pair for females, plus individual family rooms X-)
I think it depends a lot on your population of women (e.g., you might get very different answers in San Francisco or Cambridge -- either Cambridge, actually, but I'm thinking of the one in the UK -- than in Memphis or Tunbridge Wells). But questions of the form "how shall we treat members of this distrusted minority group?" may not be best answered by majority vote.
First is #3 in my list; drawback is space and hence cost. Second is one I hadn't thought of but should have; one drawback is space, another is that to make it work you presumably have to say that obviously-trans people must use these changing rooms which (1) is probably going to be unpleasant for them and (2) maybe make things a little too easy for potential assailants (as I remarked earlier, rates of sexual violence against trans people are high; suppose you're someone who would assault trans people, and suppose you find that the gym you attend has a special room that any teams person attending has to use and will take their clothes off in, where nobody else is likely to be...)
Umm... how did you phrase it? Ah: "which I suggest is not an argument".
I find many things in life unpleasant but I do not consider it sufficient reason to demand that the world be rearranged according to my sensitivities.
If you want a more general rule: self-selection into a group should not generate any additional rights (at least without matching responsibilities).
That strikes me a bit too paranoid. A changing room in a gym is not the middle of a dark forest. Unisex bathrooms are pretty common by now and I haven't seen any data about them encouraging sexual predators. If you are that concerned about safety, maybe install additional street lighting? And cameras! Don't forget about cameras! Only beneath the watchful eyes can you be secure!!
So when I said that "ewww" isn't an argument I was taking it to mean "I find contemplating X unpleasant" rather than "if X happens, people Y who experience it will find it unpleasant". The former is a much much weaker argument than the latter.
(I should, of course, have considered the latter as well, and I'm not sure why I didn't. If women at a gym find it unpleasant when someone who identifies as female but has male-looking anatomy uses their changing room -- which they well might -- that is a bad thing, and that fact does constitute an argument for not allowing that. I happen to think that the arguments the other way are stronger, but as I said before I think both sides are defensible.)
In the case we're discussing here, the additional right comes with a perfectly matched additional responsibility. If access to a gym's changing rooms goes by expressed gender identity rather than anatomy, then identifying as female lets you into the women's rooms at exactly the same time as it bars you from the men's.
(One might argue that in fact someone with female identity but male anatomy should be allowed to use either to reduce the likelihood of their getting assaulted, or something. Members of unusually vulnerable groups sometimes get additional rights even if membership of the group is self-selected, and that's not obviously unreasonable. The additional rights are compensating for additional risks rather than additional responsibilities they people in question have taken on.)
Nice steelmanning of my position. No, wait, not steelmanning. The other thing.
But I'm a bit confused now about what your position is, because I think you've now said the following things:
and I'm not sure how to fill in that [...] at the end. "... because the (other) women may feel uncomfortable"? (But you just said that the fact that some people will feel uncomfortable shouldn't count for much in designing gym changing rooms.) "... because the (other) women may be at danger of assault"? (But you just said that we shouldn't worry about assaults in gym changing rooms.)
A nitpick: it is not male-looking anatomy, it is male anatomy.
Which responsibility? If I am of whatever gender I say I am, I can change genders at will. I am not "barred" from the other changing room any more than picking one door to walk through "bars" me from the other door.
That didn't involve transmuting your position into either steel or straw. That was just me amusing myself :-) I did not mean to imply anything about your views on widespread surveillance.
I don't have a well-developed position delineated by bright lines. Basically you have a conflict between two groups -- let's call them "trans" and "mainstream". Such a conflict is nothing unusual and, indeed, the entirely normal state of a human society. Typically such conflicts are resolved according the the balance of power between the groups -- the results vary from one side fully suppressing the other to an equally-unsatisfying compromise. Occasionally the stars align and it turns out that the conflict is easily fixable and can be "dissolved" in LW lingo.
In contemporary Western societies such conflicts are usually resolved politically which means that the sides wage a cultural war "for the hearts and minds". This kind of war uses propaganda as weapons. Accordingly, the war involves loud screaming about morals, justice, fairness, God's will, etc. etc. -- whatever is needed for the agitprop needs of the day. I tend to by very cynical about such agitprop.
Note, by the way, that a completely general answer to the there-is-a-tranny-in-my-shower problem does not exist. As you yourself observed, it all depends on the local culture. A good solution for the showers in San Francisco's Castro district is likely to be different from a solution for downtown Salt Lake City -- and that's even staying inside one country.
What's visible to, and possibly disturbing for, the people in the changing room is what it looks like. I don't know, e.g., whether you would consider a post-op female-to-male transsexual person's anatomy male or merely male-looking, but I take it it would be about as disturbing in that context as a straightforwardly cis man's. So the relevant question is what it looks like.
I am pretty sure no one is in fact proposing that people be able to change their gender at will simply by saying "I'm a woman now". (Yeah, you could read Fluttershy's comment upthread that way, but I'm quite confident it wasn't so intended.)
Good! But I can't help noticing that your cynicism has been deployed only in one direction in this discussion, even though (so it seems to me) there's plenty of moral-outrage agitprop coming from elsewhere.
No, you're proposing that anyone can change genders at will by saying "I'm a woman now" and make an attempt to look like the other gender, dress like the other gender and insist on being referred to by opposite gender pronouns and name (that's how you defined "presenting as the other gender" here). While this is technically slightly more then saying "I'm a woman now", it's only barely so.
And frankly, I doubt you'd refuse to take the word of someone who insisted that he was always a "she" but didn't bother with changing name, clothing, or appearance.
I think it's very importantly different. It means, for instance, that
both of which greatly decrease its utility to people wanting to ogle or assault women in public restrooms, gym changing rooms, etc. (The fact that it requires you to make yourself appear less "manly" probably also has that effect.)
You may doubt whatever you please, I suppose.
(If someone declared themself female but made no sign of any attempt to "be" female beyond that declaration, I'd attempt to go along with their pronoun preferences but wouldn't, e.g., let them into any female-only premises I was responsible for. I don't think I would actually consider them female for any practical purposes, though further interactions might convince me that there was something more going on than a liking for feminine pronouns -- e.g., maybe the person is young, still living with and dependent on parents, and the parents are very strongly opposed. In such a case I still wouldn't let them into female-only premises but would be apologetic about it :-).)
How so? The only things in that list that take any effort at all are dressing and looking like a women. The former isn't that hard, it's easy to get a dress, heck these days many women wear jeans and a T-shirt, or suites, or other "male clothing", so anything a men would normally wear could count as "female clothing". The latter also isn't that hard, see the existence of drag queens, or any number of comedians.
I don't know about that. You don't interpret common statements along the lines of "Only you have the right to decide your gender identity" or, in the negative form, "No one can tell you which gender you are" this way?
The other direction, which I assume would have been represented by "God will burn you in hell forever, your freaks!" and/or "You need to be fixed and re-educated, this is for your own benefit" is strangely absent on LW :-) I doubt even VoiceOfRa would express the desire to go back to the ways of dealing with "sexual deviants" popular in the early and mid XX century.
More importantly, in my social circles (both meatspace and online) the left is the aggressor and tends to take the "If you're not with us you're against us. KILL!!!!" approach. If I were stuck in a small town in America's Bible Belt, for example, I would expect my emphasis to be different.
That's a separate question that touches on a whole bunch of other issues. It's related to the question of what the proper way of dealing with the guy who insists he's Jesus is.
No, I don't interpret "only you have the right..." etc. that way. I would guess that people saying it usually mean something like this: your gender is whatever it is, it's reasonably stable over time, and it's not something other people can know by looking at you or doing medical tests; so people should beyond what you say. But if you change your professed gender every five minutes no one is going to believe you are sincere and take you seriously.
Well, he seems to me to be quite far in "the other direction".
Here on LW, it seems to me the nearest thing to aggression on this topic has been VoR ranting about delusions, hallucinations, "trannies", etc., etc. There's some very aggressive "social justice" out there, for sure, but it's pretty much completely unrepresented on LW, whereas neoreaction is alive and well here even though there aren't very many neoreactionaries.
[EDITED to fix the typo mentioned two comments downthread.]
Rants are not aggression but free speech :-) Confusing the two is a common mistake/tactic :-P
I think that used to be true, but is no longer true. As far as I can see, VoiceOfRa is the lone neoreactionary actively posting.
Read it as "is probably going to make them (and possibly their friends) less willing to spend money in my gym".
That translation applies just as well to gjm's original statement.