Social media app just for 'females' intentionally excludes trans women
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
> "We wanted a place where women could go to help each other," she said in an email. "A female space, in the palm of their hand. Where women could find support, connection and a refuge amongst other women no matter where they were or what they were doing."
And yet the reaction to the two seems to be divergent. We've clearly stopped caring for eliminating discrimination and now are hellbent on fostering discrimination, so long as its discriminating against the "right" groups. Hard to keep up with what groups are "right" to discriminate against on any particular day, though. Seems like a race to the bottom to me.
- A Smirking Philosopher
Trans women face discrimination in many of the same ways that cis women do, and in most circumstances it's best to simply treat them as women. There are a somewhat-nebulous set of cases that should be restricted to cis women, but much of the time those cases are more about anti-trans-discrimination than actually protecting cis women in particular.
Any case of discrimination for the benefit of marginalized groups is going to invite scrutiny, and sometimes legitimate disagreement. It sounds to me like this case is reasonable to exclude men, but not to exclude trans women. The fact that they don't menstruate, for example, doesn't mark them as non-women: lots of women don't menstruate (young, old, ill, athletes, anorexics, etc.) It's true that many lacked girlhoods, but increasingly many have transitioned at a young age.
That's my cursory opinion. It could change if I were exposed to more details.
But I don't consider it helpful to say "to end discrimination we should stop letting people self-segregate". That attitude fosters abuse by people who discriminate, and forbids people from protecting themselves against it. Maybe in the future it will be helpful, but today it harms a lot of people.
- Dedication to the color "pink" representing women (classical pre-birth gender roles)
- Defining the gender "women" as exclusively people who were sexed female-only at birth (assumption-by-framing discrimination vs. transgender, intersex)
- Implying that gender is permanently affixed through bone structures to each human body at birth (classical definition that gender == sex)
- Declaring that only binary genders "male" and "female" exist (inflexible binary gender roles)
So I expect that this app will end up banned for promoting hate speech as a result — not because they're attempting to create a women-only space, but because they're attempting to create a social space where TERF hate speech is welcomed and encouraged.
Free association is about being able to decide (which is to say, make a choice by discrimination) about who to associate with. Conflating the legal concept of discrimination and the right to discriminate via the biological function of the senses, does not help things.
It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose skin color is unacceptable to the app.
It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose biological sex at birth is unacceptable to the app.
None of these criteria have any bearing whatsoever on gender. They’re saying “women” out loud, but what they’re trying to filter for in practice is “people who were sexed female-only at birth and meet a restrictive set of facial characteristics”. Women have a variety of biological sexes at birth (male, female, both, neither). Women have a variety of facial characteristics (feminine, masculine, androgynous, mixed). So it’s news that they’re trying to discriminate by redefining “women” to exclude some women.
They have chosen an imperfect solution to validate that their users are who they say they are, sure, but they have resorted to this measure to try to keep this space as their own.
If this imaginary trans women space accepted all serious forms of presurgical or partial-surgical proof, such as a doctor’s letter or a hormone prescription or an orchiectomy or etc, then that would not be discriminatory and would be fine.
The core issue here is that this app is trying to enforce gender as purely a function of physical characteristics, denying altogether that gender is more complicated than that and is not guaranteed to be linked to any physical characteristics whatsoever. Their ”women only” definitions fail the transgender women test, the intersex test, and the “born female-sex athletes with high testosterone and masculine facial features” test.
Either they are blithely unaware of these complications, or they are unconcerned with them. That is, itself, newsworthy.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Edit: Seeing the state of the comment section for this submission, why not remove the article?
EXCLUSIVE: 'We're uncomfortable in our own locker room.' Lia Thomas' UPenn teammate tells how the trans swimmer doesn't always cover up her male genitals when changing and their concerns go ignored by their coach
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas...