[otde]

On other subjects on HN (software, mostly), I find curious, questioning people, who will, for the most part, engage very seriously with the subject matter. I think this is because users here engage with software -- the creation, maintenance, collaboration, the joy and misery of it all -- frequently and with a passion for nuance.

When high-visibility articles on trans people show up, it's almost inevitably when our transness -- our ability to move through the world, to exist in certain spaces, or even if we exist at all -- is the subject of debate. I don't know how many cisgender folks here really get how fundamentally exhausting it is to have some part of your identity always be part of a debate, to be talked about or on rare occasions talked to, but almost never engaged with in a substantive way.

It's just fear fear fear, 24/7 -- simulating hypothetical nightmare worlds where trans rapists lurk in bathrooms and prisons, where every Olympic gold medal is taken by a man masquerading as a woman, roving hordes of red-faced trans activists screaming incoherently online at nice, well-meaning, harmless people who just want to learn.

I just wanted to put out there that the flattened, simplified perspectives trans people are portrayed with may not give you the whole picture, and I'd encourage people here to give perspectives from trans people the same (well, more, preferably) curiosity and interest that you might give to scare quotes and soundbites about prisons, bathrooms, and sports.

[worik]

I agree that there is more heat than light in these debates.

The Gender Critical Feminists do make up bogeyman stories about rapists in prisons, trans women disrupting breast feeding groups etcetera.

The Trans lobby though has also been guilty of the same sort of thing. E.g. I am no fan of professional sport (I hope this kills it dead) but to claim that trans women have no advantage over natal women is opinion not fact. The main fault line ion our society is gender, and to claim otherwise is simply wrong. (Not all Trans activists do that, just as not all Gender Critical Feminists are mean).

To me it is heartbreaking that this is not about fixing that fault line. No person has the right to take a interest in another person's gender unless they are their doctor or fancy them and are fussy. That is the issue we should address - how boys are raised to be violent sexual predators requiring female admiration and women are raised to be weak victims requiring male support.

That is getting lost, instead of helping fix the fault line, this debate (the excess of heat, deficiency of light) is making it worse.

[whoooooo123]

> bogeyman stories about rapists in prisons

As I said in another comment, this is far from a bogeyman story - there was already a case in the UK of a male-bodied convicted rapist being housed in a woman's prison because "she" decided post-conviction that "she" identified as female. She then went on to sexually assault multiple female inmates. Look up the name Karen White.

I put "she" in quotes not because I have a problem with respecting trans people's pronouns in general but because there have been suggestions that this particular criminal didn't really identify as trans and the whole thing was a cynical ploy to get access to easy victims.

Obviously the vast majority of trans people are not Karen White, but then this is the exact kind of thing that people warned would happen when self-id gets taken to its logical conclusion. Sweeping it under the rug isn't a good look.

Obviously there are transphobes out there who'll point to Karen White and disingenuously say "we're only trying to stop female inmates from getting raped!" when in fact that's just a cudgel for their real, more sinister agenda. But that makes it more important that decent people be allowed to discuss these issues in good faith.

If normal people aren't allowed to have an honest conversation about the thorny aspects of (say) gender self-id, the only people left to discuss it will be the lunatics who don't care about appearing respectable. They'll even be empowered, because it lets them say to their base "look! The authorities are trying to hide this from you!"

[otde]

Here’s what I mean when I asked us to consider perspectives of trans people —- I want you to understand us not just as potential perpetrators of violence here, but also as recipients. Trans women are subject to prison rape at apparently disproportionate levels [1][2] when housed in men’s prisons. Instead of framing this as “is it ethical to move a woman to a women’s prison on the off chance she’s a man gaming the system,” I would consider asking “is it an acceptable tradeoff to keep a woman in men’s prison on the off chance she’s a secret rapist, even if her chances of being raped herself are increased as a result?”

It’s worthwhile to interrogate some of the ways we frame these kinds of discussions, implicitly or otherwise, myself included!

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/transgender-women-ar...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_St...

[whoooooo123]

That's a fair point, and I don't know what the solution is. Thanks for engaging with my post in good faith.

Self-ID in particular is a salient issue in the UK because the Conservative government had plans to implement it, but recently scrapped those plans in favour of the existing system (trans people in the UK can get legal recognition of their gender change but it's a medicalised process that takes one year; the proposed changes would have made it as easy as signing a single piece of paper.) I don't know what the perfect system looks like, but we need to be able to talk about edge cases.

By the way, Karen White wasn't suspected of being a "secret rapist" - she was a rapist. The reason she was in jail in the first place was that she had been convicted of raping women.

[otde]

I’m glad you’re able to see it as an edge case, but part of the reason we get so defensive is precisely because people who typically cite the story don’t want to see it as an edge case.

I used “secret” with a clear intention here, because on the gender-critical side, categorical rejection of trans women from womanhood is a core belief. It follows that if you don’t believe any trans woman is “actually” a woman, that every trans woman is just a man trying to be sneaky, then every trans woman in prison, regardless of existing convictions, is a potential Karen White.

White’s rape conviction is probably the more germane data point in that particular edge case. From there the question might be: how do women’s prisons handle cisgender women with rape convictions against other women right now? What potential problems, if any, would arise if we implemented similar procedures for trans women? How might those procedures help or hurt trans people?

(This might also lead to higher level questions about the efficacy of prisons in a broader sense, but that’s outside our scope here.)

When, as trans people, we see edge cases brought up like this, they’re so often used as a means of depicting us as potential Karen Whites that, to the extent that we even bother engaging, it comes from a defensive place. I hope you can understand that I’m choosing to engage here both because I do see well-meaning people like you on this site and because I think the site needs a counterpoint to the FUD about trans people, even if I dread some of the nastier responses.

[worik]

> - there was already a case in the UK of a male-bodied convicted rapist being housed in a woman's prison because "she" decided post-conviction that "she" identified as female.

That is my point about gaolers being sadists. What do they do with aggressive women who get their thrills sexually predating on other women? They should not go into general population if the gaolers are not sadists....

In my country a young man (about twenty years) was housed in a cell with a known rapist who raped him every night for nine months.

That is my point: Prisoners need to be protected from each other, they are not, because by ad large gaolers are sadists and the general public does not know or really care much.

[f154hfds]

How is the sports concern illegitimate? It seems it's already a major issue today, as we speak. We're past the point of hypothetical worst-case scenarios in that respect.

[otde]

Being trans is one of many possible attributes a person can possess (tall, short, skinny, fat, and so on)! There are lots of ways a person's body can be built that may give them an advantage or disadvantage over another person.

Strength and speed are not the sole metrics by which Olympic medals are awarded, either. Some people are taller than other people, some people are shorter, some are trans and some aren't. None of that categorically excludes trans women from womanhood, so I don't see why that would preclude them from entering into women's events. It comes back to a fundamental distrust of trans women as containing some vaguely cited percentage of lying cisgender men.

For a bad-faith actor to take advantage of the current system, they'd have to transition medically and socially, wait for years (in Laurel Hubbard, the potential first trans Olympian's case, at least five -- she quit in 2001, transitioned in 2012, then began competing in 2017), and then stay that way for as long as it would require to convince people that you've fully transitioned (could be decades or the rest of their life, depending on how they'd want their legacy to live on). The incentive structure is just completely out of whack. You'd have to fight tooth and nail for something you don't actually identify with, and live with the physical and psychological effects for years or possibly decades, plus living with the general harassment people would give you for perceiving you as trans and for trying to compete in the Olympics, and then what? You think with how stringent the IOC tries to be with doping that they wouldn't figure that one out? You think the backlash wouldn't be absolutely enormous?

What about this is "worst" case, anyway? We might get our first trans person who's even allowed to compete this year. It's a totally disproportionate response.