[slg]

>But sometimes they are zero-sum. The right of women and girls to have female-only spaces, for example.

How is this different from a white person wanting a "whites only space"? Because you are seemingly arguing for a right to segregation. I think we are better off reconsidering the root desire and how that should manifest itself in a concrete right.

For example, what right do you think the children have in youth sports?

Do they have a right to win?

Do they have a right to be on a team?

Do they have a right to compete?

Do they have the right to compete against someone with equal talent?

Should it be allowed to force a younger kid to compete against older kids?

What about a short kid against tall kids?

Should a Muslim fasting for Ramadan have to compete against Christians with no dietary restrictions?

Can a white child complain about having to compete against black children?

What if only one girl wants to play a specific sport, is it legal to force her to compete on the boys team? What if all the boys are better than her?

I just don't know how you answer these questions consistently and end up in a place in which trans athletes are your only fairness concern.

[granibran]

I see you're no longer claiming that this isn't zero-sum. Instead you now seem to be advocating that every single-sex space should be mixed-sex.

Just eradicate all female-only spaces entirely, is that the suggestion? This seems to be your logic here.

We had this arrangement with prisons, by the way. Up until the end of the 19th century prisons housed both sexes in the same estate. Female prisoners were routinely and regularly sexually assaulted, raped, impregnated. By men. That's why prisons are segregated by sex in most places today.

Now some prison authorities are trying this arrangement again. Converting female prisons to mixed-sex prisons. With the same results.

And for some reason you're making a parallel of this to racial segregation? Make it make sense, please.

[slg]

I'm not conceding that rights are zero-sum. I'm trying to get to why you think people have the right to single sex spaces. What is the motivator for that belief and would that same motivator suggest that people have a right to segregation from other protected classes?

I think women have a right to safety. They have a right to privacy. They have a right to being given the same opportunities as anyone else. A girl has a right to compete in sports. She doesn't have a right to win at sports or even a guaranteed spot on the team. Those rights are not zero-sum. The rights of a cis girl are not violated when she competes against a trans girl.

[granibran]

There are many, many reasons why we have sex-separated spaces: privacy, dignity, modesty, safety, fairness, peace of mind, personal hygiene, santiation, cleanliness of facilities, lesbian and gay socialising, group bonding, therapeutic efficacy, organizing and campaigning. And probably others that don't come to mind right now. This is generally for the benefit of women, but also for men too on some of these principles.

Tearing all this up and insisting that any man who says he's a women must be permitted to impose himself on female spaces quite obviously encroaches on this.

For example you refer to girls competing in girls' sport. When a boy who says he's a girl (or "trans girl" as you put it) is allowed to compete, this violates several of the above principles for actual girls. Fairness, due to male performance advantage. Safety, when it's a contact sport. Privacy and dignity, if he's also imposing himself on the girls' locker rooms. Peace of mind, as the girls are forced to contend with all of this for no reason other than to keep the male happy.

More generally, all this does is disadvantage women and girls, solely for the pleasure of some males who, by definition, don't even belong in these spaces but decided that they want to impose themselves anyway and, to them, that's all that matters.

[slg]

>There are many, many reasons why we have sex-separated spaces: privacy, dignity, modesty, safety, fairness, peace of mind, personal hygiene, santiation, cleanliness of facilities, lesbian and gay socialising, group bonding, therapeutic efficacy, organizing and campaigning.

But that was only half of the equation. Why are these "rights" only relevant for women? How can you define these as a right if other groups do not have the same protection?

>privacy, dignity, modesty,

Can a straight man cite his right for "privacy, dignity, modesty" when kicking a gay man out of a locker room?

>safety

Do you think it would be safe for a trans woman who has surgically transitioned to be housed in a male prison?

>fairness

I dedicated almost that whole previous post trying to get you to define what a right to "fairness" really means, but you ignored all those questions.

>peace of mind

Do you think a passenger should be able to force an airline to kick a Muslim off a plane to get "peace of mind"?

>personal hygiene, santiation, cleanliness of facilities,

Are my rights violated if I walk into a public restroom and the person before me didn't flush?

>lesbian and gay socialising

If homosexuals have a right to their own segregated socializing environment, can a school host a dance for only straight people?

>organizing and campaigning

Could a campaign event for a local white politician kick someone out for simply being black?

[granibran]

I'm sorry that you spent so much time writing out so many irrelevant questions when the topic we're discussing is the threat to women's rights from males who feel entitled to usurp every space that's intended solely for women. I'll answer the relevant ones and ignore the others. I don't see much point in encouraging gish gallop discussions, let's keep it focused.

> Do you think it would be safe for a trans woman who has surgically transitioned to be housed in a male prison?

Depends on how well the prison is safeguarding its vulnerable male prisoners. I expect your implication here is that he should be moved to a female prison. That's usually why this question is asked in this sort of discussion. However this would obviously be nonsense, as he is male and therefore his safety is the responsibility of those running the male prison. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the female prison estate.

> I dedicated almost that whole previous post trying to get you to define what a right to "fairness" really means, but you ignored all those questions.

No, sorry but you asked a load of questions irrelevant to the topic. Just to expand on my earlier response: female-only sporting competitions exist for the most part because male performance is such a huge categorical advantage that sex segregation is needed for the competitive advantages amongst women and girls to play out. Allowing a subset of males to compete in women's sport just because they demand to is fundamentally unfair, because of this categorical advantage.

[slg]

>the topic we're discussing is the threat to women's rights from males

And that is a perfect summary of the conversation because I would say I was discussing universal rights. I believe that central to the idea of rights is that they are applied universally. You were advocating for women to be a legally distinct and implicitly lesser group than any other class of people because you think they need explicit protections from men. I intended for my questions to show the flaws in defining rights that way by applying those concepts to other groups. I was pointing out we don't define gay rights in relation to straight rights or the rights of black people in relation to white people. Defining women's rights by their relationship to men is codifying a gender hierarchy. "Separate but equal" is not a desired end state of civil rights.