Many school curriculums teach that science proves that gender isn't a binary and is divorced from sex, and they often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) also go further to say that it is hateful to believe otherwise.
So anyone who has an internal moral voice that speaks to this issue, may be contradicted by science.
The school curriculums basically boil down to "Most people are either men or women. Some people aren't, and that's okay - you should still treat them like anyone else." Does your internal moral voice object to any part of that, or is it something else I am missing here?
Do you also disagree with schools teaching kids in a similar fashion about the existence of left-handed people, redheaded people, or handicapped people?
I'm arguing the point, not my own conviction.
The inner moral voice I was defending was someone who believes that it's important to acknowledge and respect the differing roles of the sexes. And object to the scientific insistence that we should concentrate as much on the exceptions as on the normal case.
And I don't think you've accurately depicted the typical stance of schools today, where sex is not based on biology, but instead on social construction. If you need any proof of that, look through this thread and see how many people object to the idea that the physical characteristic of say a penis, and its insemination role in reproduction, is a defining characteristic of a male of the species. People aren't even pretending to make a distinction between gender and sex, they literally have a problem with defining human sexual roles via genitalia.
Is that what they're just teaching, or are they saying that a) human nature is fundamentally gendered, and b) men and women are gender rather than sex classes - that how you look, think and feel relative to socially constructed and recognised gender stereotypes determines what sex you actually are, and that early medical intervention may be necessary to put your mind in the correct type of body?
I agree that society shouldn't police gender non-conformity (perhaps what many home-schoolers would actually like society to do) but as a 'people are a collection of unique individuals, differentiated by sex for the narrow purposes of biological reproduction' kind of person I also object to the 'viewing society through the prism of innate gender' position - which some schools seem to be teaching as scientifically correct when it's actually much more like a ideological and / or metaphysical belief.
No, that is not a strawman https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/transgender-rikers-inmate-gets...
Or female rapists who rape other females with females?
Your morality stops at protecting females against males?
Or should our morality stop at: "since we can't or don't protect everybody let's leave an obvious, extremely vulnerable, and much more common (male-> female rape vs male->male rape) victim class unprotected?"
Women's prisons do not exist for the purpose of forcing women to be human shields against male-on-male sexual violence.
You don't fix prisons by moving inmates. Having inmates socially interact with large groups of other inmates doesn't sound healthy or wise gender not withstanding. You can't put a group together who's only common interest is crime. Each criminal should be housed separately and socialized with trained pros who can help them work through why they are there. It would pay for itself when criminals don't return to crime. At least make it available for the last 6 months
Because illegal abuse will probably always exist - some humans will treat others like craps, illegally. People still understand that those things are wrong.
The act of putting actual perpetrators with a class of much less physically strong victims into the same confined space, however, points to specific mindset where doing wrong is thought as doing right, and not just by one or more wicked persons, but also with state power to support it.
> The act of putting actual perpetrators with a class of much less physically strong victims into the same confined space, however, points to specific mindset where doing wrong is thought as doing right, and not just by one or more wicked persons, but also with state power to support it.
I'm fairly certain regular prisons don't sort by size either, and not all men or women are built the same.
>I'm fairly certain regular prisons they don't sort by size either, and not all men are built the same.
Yes, so let's put women prisoners and biologically stronger male rapists together then, until we also seperate all prisoners by height and strength in the general case...
AKA: there's bad happening already in prisons, so adding bad to it, even if it's a stupidly predictable to foresee and prevent bad, is fine!
I'd argue that we need to actually look at the rate of occurrences for these things and not look at a NY Post article about a single occurrence and our own internal biases and intuition around "biological strength".
Bad stuff happens in prison, we're all agreed, the issue I see is that a much worse outcome is entirely predictable but many people are afraid they're committing a hate crime unless they blind themselves to that eventuality. And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"
> And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"
Good question - this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid and if they are sexually assaulted in prison at a hugely higher rate (13x)[1] that's acceptable because we need to stop a hypothetical legion of rapists.
[1] https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.edu/dist/0/1149/file...
Exactly. They aren't. A 'trans woman' is a type of man and needs to be treated as such when his demands and desires come into conflict with women's needs.
I don't know, why didn't the judge do that in this case? Why not do that with trans athletes? Seems like an obvious solution, yet it wasn't taken. That's the kind of willful blindness (or weakness to social pressure) I'm pointing to.
>this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid
It really isn't. Some people really have gender dysphoria (I was one so I'm not just talking out of my ass here) and some people really have strong incentives to claim they have gender dysphoria when they don't. Both can be true. What led to this story is that we can't bring ourselves to investigate whether one particular person could be lying.
The problem I'm pointing to isn't that some people have gender dysphoria (some do) or that it's a difficult condition to accommodate (it's really not) or even that our medical system is shit at treating it (it is, but that's a separate problem). The problem is that elements of our culture prioritize helping victims over preventing victimization. Because of their awful health outcomes, trans people today are held as a special class of victim and their desires - not their health outcomes be it noted - are held paramount. Well meaning people would rather prevent trans prisoners today from being raped than ciswomen prisoners tomorrow, despite the obvious asymmetry of suffering in those scenarios. Trans people matter more because they're suffering more, never mind how much suffering would be caused by 'simply affirming their right to exist'.
That's what mainstream curricula are teaching and that's what my moral sense objects to.
What asymmetry is that? I provided a statistic for the abuse trans women currently suffer in the system, but no one else has provided anything but anecdotes and appeals to some sort of common sense. It, and correct me if I'm wrong, feels like you're giving a similar sort of special reverence to cis women who suffer sexual assault than trans.
To be clear, I think sexual assault is bad all around and I hate the idea of abusers slipping being enabled, but it's somehow acceptable that many many trans women are abused instead of the potential for even one more cis woman to be sexually abused in prison than there already are (let's not kid ourselves here, scads of abuse already happens).
I guess the answer to this particular trolley problem for many people is to not even consider pulling the lever because it's 5 trans women but one cis.
This story is the result of two widely accepted proposals:
-Transwomen belong in women's spaces. -The only moral response to someone coming out as trans is to affirm their new identity.
If you agree with both proposals, and many people do, that means in practice you believe one transgender woman is worth >99 cisgender women. No one says that out loud, but prioritizing victimhood means that's the calculus they deal in. Adding more exceptions to problematic examples like this one doesn't address the root problem with that hierarchy of values.
If we want to have this discussion, please provide some actual data about the rate trans women sexually assault women in women's prisons.
There is also no data whatsoever indicating that if a man calls himself a woman, then he poses any less risk to women than other men.
I agree that prisons need to stay sex-segregated, or revert back to being so where authorities have made this abominable ideological error of incarcerating men in the women's prisons.
> Individuals beliefs are often contradicted by science.
Not sure why you asked the first question, given your belief in the second.
And those morals might not be entirely internal if they're regularly preached to.