Wings Over Scotland

How the fuck will I cope, is that transphobic?

Thank you Stu for highlighting this issue – hopefully by posting it here it’ll reach a wider audience – this is not a ‘feminist’ thing folks, this is a discussion we should all be having! (unless you don’t have a mum, wife, sister, aunty, niece etc)

Aside from that, as Wings readers, you all know the value of facts, and how language and framing are important!!

M. BuggerLePanda
I’m fairly sure binary language code will also be deemed transphobic. As I’m drinking Earl Grey Tea I expect to be on a watchlist very soon.

Phew – nothing on Cheese & Onion Crisps

The woke-brigade are undermining the normative foundations of human rights, at a time of economic crises and the rise of authoritarian, right-wing, nationalism. This is no coincidence, IMHO. Open society is currently under extreme pressure and self-ID may be key to its’ imprisonment. Control language and you control decent.

Feminist Theory And The Law

Abstract and Keywords

American feminists have identified law as an instrument of male supremacy since their first national gathering at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Critiques of law thus became an important part of the early feminist movement, which succeeded in eradicating the most blatant examples of legal sexism. The successes of the contemporary feminist movement might not have happened without one of those early successes: the opening of higher education to women. Contemporary feminism has had a profound and lasting impact on intellectual discourse.

Many young scholars focused on gender in their research, pursuing the feminist goal “to question everything.” These scholars and their successors continue to realize the revolutionary potential of feminist thought. “Feminist jurisprudence,” as it came to be called, is law’s equivalent of feminist history, feminist psychology, feminist philosophy, and their counterparts. Feminist jurisprudence has borrowed freely and fruitfully from these cognate disciplines. This article examines the premise and presence of male bias, feminist jurisprudence and gendered reality, and feminist legal reasoning.

Keywords: law, feminism, feminist jurisprudence, bias, women, legal reasoning, legal sexism, feminist psychology, feminist philosophy

link to oxfordhandbooks.com

At the risk of appearing coarse and upsetting people (youngest readers, please look away now) FFS.

I can honestly say that i have never encountered an issue with any of the above list in my 52 years on earth.

Maybe it is because i respect people’s right to be who and whatever they want to be, and just go about living my life as I prefer.

I only ever identify as ‘me’. If others do not like me for that, then good for them.

Ever been on holiday in a country where the female cleaners simply wander into to toilets to clean them unannounced ?

You have 2 options, freak out and get all upset, or continue as you are, unaffected.

If you are the former, then that list will probably freak you out and make you a social hermit (unless hermits are transphobic, as i see its not on the list).

If you are the latter, then life probably (and rightly) simply moves along just fine.

Sometimes, life is as difficult as you choose to make it.

Well, Bud Light…

@geeo says:
30 May, 2019 at 1:56 pm
======================

Sheesh, talk about completely missing the point. People can’t be relaxed about these things because they are under torrents of unpleasant abuse for stating basic facts. It’s ridiculous to expect them to “shrug their shoulders” about it. Even worse, as the Rev points out, police and politicians are going along with it in some cases when they really should be calling it out.

Does my dislike to gender neutral toilets cancel out the fact I am a biologist?

Conflating sex with gender undermines science and our potential to make effective public policy.

Resisting Sex/Gender Conflation: A Rejoinder to John Hood-Williams

Abstract

The irony of the rejection of the sex/gender distinction is that it renders sociology per se an impossible enterprise. For it is my submission that, contra Hood-Williams (1996) and others, the biological and the social constitute distinct, irreducible levels of reality: to conflate (in a ‘downwards’ or ‘upwards’ direction) the two levels is immediately to render analysis of their relative interplay at best intractable.

It is indeed arguable that Hood-Williams is not so much concerned with (rightly) rejecting the so-called ‘additive’ approach to the biological and the social where the biological base is seen a priori as immutable, but more fundamentally with rejecting the necessary dualism of nature and culture (ie the biological and the social).

In contradistinction, a realist defence of the sex/gender distinction will be made, involving critical reference to various major writers in the field and offering a brief but tentative discussion of the provenance of gender.

link to journals.sagepub.com

Stu mac@2.12pm

Oh right, so because i choose to respect everyone’s decision to live their life, as they see fit, as i get on with living mine, and feel no need to get involved in their lives, issues with stuff leading from their life choices/situations, then YOU attack ME for MY view in regards to that ??

So sorry, was i not fucking offended enough for you?

Should i be offended/bothered, just to please you ?

Away and shite.

Because i take that view, DOES NOT mean i do not understand the issues ffs.

They can fuck right off and take their wokey transgender activist technical jargon and etiquette with them.

These trans activists really are a rabid, miserable and bitter bunch.

The woke-brigade consider themselves as progressive but they as actually regressive, they are assisting the return to paternalistic patriarchy. A lack of systematic discipline withing the social sciences is partly to blame for encouraging this.

Unintended Consequences of the Feminist Sex/Gender Distinction

The average person does not distinguish between “sex” and “gender,” and uses the two terms interchangeably. The same can be said of a significant number of social scientists. For instance, an unsystematic review of one recent issue of Sociological Forum and several recent issues of American Journal of Sociology produced five examples of this conflation of sex and gender (Bonilla-Silva et al., 562; Huffman and Cohen, 912; Lincoln and Allen, 621; Petersen and Saporta, 855; Rutherford, 593).

This treatment of “sex” and “gender” as synonymous dismisses, whether knowingly or unknowingly, the considerable conceptual work of gender scholars over the last thirty years and harks back to essentialist as well as determinist notions of sex, conflating, among other things, social roles, psychological dispositions, power differences, norms of grooming and comportment, sexual object choice and reproductive anatomy.

Such an understanding thus collapses important intellectual and experiential distinctions; in so doing, it also fails to provide conceptual categories for the experiences of women and men whose sex, gender, and/or sexuality do not “align” in socially normative ways. The instantiation of the conceptual separation of gender from sex was an effort to give language to some of these distinctions, and the subsequent rigorous critical assessment of the term “gender” over the intervening decades has further refined them.

[2] Although it is impossible to make accurate generalizations about the work of all gender scholars, the prevailing trends can be usefully defined and studied. Here I am addressing the vast body of gender scholarship that continues to rely, either implicitly or explicitly, on the conceptual distinction between sex and gender. While my analysis draws predominantly – though not exclusively – on social scientific scholarship, the trends I will outline apply equally to humanistic scholarship that is organized conceptually by the sex/gender distinction….

link to colorado.edu

Cameronb brodie

This is what happens when the social sciences started denying biological facts to push feminist ideology over common sense. Now biology means nothing. It was good when we got to pretend that all of female problems in society were manufactured deliberately by evil men wasnt it? This where this garbage leads

Is keeping quiet transphobic? Sorry, I have probably just been transphobic in asking that question.

Although I appreciate the “discursive turn” has added to our understanding and sensitivity towards the human condition, it is vital that sex classes remain grounded in biology.

Better science with sex and gender: Facilitating the use of a sex and gender-based analysis in health research

Abstract

Much work has been done to promote sex and gender-based analyses in health research and to think critically about the influence of sex and gender on health behaviours and outcomes. However, despite this increased attention on sex and gender, there remain obstacles to effectively applying and measuring these concepts in health research.

Some health researchers continue to ignore the concepts of sex and gender or incorrectly conflate their meanings. We report on a primer that was developed by the authors to help researchers understand and use the concepts of sex and gender in their work.

We provide detailed definitions of sex and gender, discuss a sex and gender-based analysis (SGBA), and suggest three approaches for incorporating sex and gender in health research at various stages of the research process. We discuss our knowledge translation process and share some of the challenges we faced in disseminating our primer with key stakeholders. In conclusion, we stress the need for continued attention to sex and gender in health research.

link to ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Just as women are becoming able to stand up for themselves and have courage eg to leave abusive relationships, to have single sex refuges, prisons, toilets etc these trans activists come along and tell them that their rights are more important and they are quite prepared to take away women’s hard fought for rights.

If this continues there will be no safe spaces for women and no womens sport – and so many people have been sooked into their nonsense without thinking it through – no groups rights should be allowed to take away another groups rights.

Dr Jim

Oh no! Biology is transphobic!

apparently it is also fascist to have policies which encourage child birth

Lol its the future man, get used to it.

I believe, to Me and most of my fellow Baby Boomers, it’s simple:

1. A cock and one or two bollocks – MALE

2. Tits and a vagina – Female

Some people, having altering surgery might fall between the two, but, good luck to them and when they finish the operations and have reached their final destination – stances 1 and 2 above apply.

Anything else is shite.

Simples

Wake me up when the blog gets back to Independence.

yesindyref2
This certainly isn’t the site’s core issue but it’s a mahoosive issue and does have relevance, IMHO, as it resembles the authoritarian destruction of the Scottish identity (see the full-English Brexit). Even if you disagree, here’s some cultural anthropology and stuff. 🙂

N.B. Sex denotes biological difference between male and female. Gender is the social psychology of sex. Gender identity is the emotional “performance” of what “sex” is thought to feel like.

Gender and Sexuality

INTRODUCTION: SEX AND GENDER ACCORDING TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS

Anthropologists are fond of pointing out that much of what we take for granted as “natural” in our lives is actually cultural – it is not grounded in the natural world or in biology but invented by humans.[2] Because culture is invented, it takes different forms in different places and changes over time in those places.

Living in the twenty-first century, we have witnessed how rapidly and dramatically culture can change, from ways of communicating to the emergence of same-sex marriage. Similarly, many of us live in culturally diverse settings and experience how varied human cultural inventions can be.

We readily accept that clothing, language, and music are cultural-invented, created, and alterable – but often find it difficult to accept that gender and sexuality are not natural but deeply embedded in and shaped by culture. We struggle with the idea that the division of humans into two and only two categories, “male” and “female,” is not universal, that “male” and “female” are cultural concepts that take different forms and have different meanings cross-culturally.

Similarly, human sexuality, rather than being simply natural is one of the most culturally significant, shaped, regulated, and symbolic of all human capacities. The concept of humans as either “heterosexual” or “homosexual” is a culturally and historically specific invention that is increasingly being challenged in the United States and elsewhere.

Part of the problem is that gender has a biological component, unlike other types of cultural inventions such as a sewing machine, cell phone, or poem. We do have bodies and there are some male-female differences, including in reproductive capacities and roles, albeit far fewer than we have been taught. Similarly, sexuality, sexual desires and responses, are partially rooted in human natural capacities. However, in many ways, sexuality and gender are like food. We have a biologically rooted need to eat to survive and we have the capacity to enjoy eating.

What constitutes “food,” what is “delicious” or “repulsive,” the contexts and meanings that surround food and human eating – those are cultural. Many potentially edible items are not “food” (rats, bumblebees, and cats in the United States, for example), and the concept of “food” itself is embedded in elaborate conventions about eating: how, when, with whom, where, “utensils,” for what purposes? A “romantic dinner” at a “gourmet restaurant” is a complex cultural invention.

link to courses.lumenlearning.com

woke

The act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue

Yeah most people don’t care about parking spaces for families with disabled pets. I wish they were woke like me.

#woke #social justice #sjw #hipster #progressive #feelthebern

link to urbandictionary.com

CBB @1536
Thank you

What the hell is transphobic … … … Oh! Wait! have I just got myself classed as transphobic?

They didn’t have such a thing when I was a boy … … Oh! Hell I’d best stop while I’m still ahead … … Err! Err!

I’ll awa an keep quiet afore they come to get me.

Aw this transgender phobia mince does ma tits in.

Queer theory has added to the sensitivity and effectiveness of educational theory and public policy. However, sex-classes that are grounded in biology are essential to the effectiveness of sex-based human rights.

SOCI 270: Sociology of Gender

Course Description:

This is an introductory course to the sociology of gender. Throughout the semester, we will explore a wide range of theories and experiences of gender, from scholarly and activist perspectives to popular representations of gender. We will examine how experiences of gender, sex, and sexuality intersect, and we will explore the patterning of socioeconomic and health outcomes and experiences of discrimination by gender identity. Theories of gender will also be applied to topics such beauty, education, sport, work, and religion….

link to mcgill.ca

I really don’t care what the topic is. I follow simple guides.
a) The rights of a few are to be respected BUT cannot dominate the rights of a much larger majority
b) The IMPACT and the INTENT must be recognised by both sides.
c) Threats of violence, closing down debate through aggressive means, should never be rewarded by giving ground.

Examples
a) religious groups
b) asking for a black coffee does not make you a racist.
c) intimidating people trying to enter a meeting

On this particular issue I have seen scientific fact dismissed with threats of violence. I have seen organised complaints to social media forums against individuals for stating established facts. I have seen a total disregard for the genuine concerns expressed by over half the population (Woman)

As with any topic I reject rewarding aggressive minorities forcing a solution through. I am also very concerned that political parties, the police, public bodies etc are surrendering to the aggressors out with any debate and before any legislation passed.

winifred mccartney@2.49pm

You mentioned the threat to womens sport there, so out of genuine curiousity, what do you think about the Castor Semenya case?

She has been punished for her natural (female) genetic make up producing higher than ‘normal’ (funnily enough, that reads different if you use the word ‘Average’) testosterone levels, and after years of degrading treatment by, well, every agency going, has been told to medically REDUCE her natural testosterone levels to a level deemed as ‘fairer’ for those she competes against.

Who decides what level it should be reduced to, for starters ?

If she keeps winning, should it be reduced further until she stops winning ?

As is, she is not even a world record holder at her chosen events on track, so actually, the issue is further clouded by that inconvenient fact, as making her potentially slower, has no sporting purpose at all.

Castor Semenya is not Transgender, she certainly considers herself all woman, despite allegations that was not the case, a fact confirmed when she disgustingly was subjected to a ‘gender check’ as a young athlete. Considering the debate here, that gender check involved basically examining her genitals, to see ‘if she was indeed a man/woman or not’!

Turns out, shock surprise, she was all woman and cleared to race.

Bitter losers seems to have driven this particular witch hunt of a young athlete and shamefully, world athletics have went along with it.

Her testosterone level is indeed higher than average, but does that really give her a FALSE advantage, like say, a drug cheat ?

Sporting greats are littered with natural ‘freaks’ of nature, like say, swimmers with massive feet, or those near 7ft basketball legends.

I do not recall anyone wishing to ‘sanction’ them to give other, less naturally endowed athletes, a ‘fairer’ chance to win.

An interesting point to note in regards to athletics, is that, the Womens 400 metre world record, set by Marita Koch of the East German generation of athletes KNOWN and proven to have routinely cheated using performance enhancing drugs, and where athletics removed lots of world record achievements by those athletes, still recognises that record in the 400m.

This despite Koch being found to have used banned anabolic steroids to set most, if not all, of her 16 world records over several years.

It is a record rarely got anywhere near in the last 34 years.

So an obvious drug cheat, keeps her tainted WR yet a young woman with a NATURALLY OCCURING advantage, is violated to prove she is a woman and forcibly disadvantaged for that, when other naturally advantages athletes are not.

All the above, and not a ‘trans activist’ in sight.

Womens sport is doing a good job of bringing itself into disrepute without any help.

To think Danny La Rue was at one time cutting edge in the gender stakes.

Is it bad I thought that picture was a kind of “Lost Boys” “The Warriors” tribute act? Or is it I went to uni in the 80’s and the New Romantics, never mind Boy George and Adam Ant were about. Not to mention the 70’s and Glam rock, or 60’s and flower power.

Obviously Jack Sparrow is transphobic too.

Mr Campbell is once again displaying his ignorance of gender issues.

@jfngw says:30 May, 2019 at 4:12 pm:

” … O/T but a tweet worth reading (not if you are a unionist).
link to twitter.com“

That’s a great comment, ifngw.
Just about 30 seconds before reading it I was finishing my evening meal and it was my first chance to think through the events of the day so far. The though that was running through my head as I sat back down at the computer was about today’s FMQ’s.

I had just thought to myself that the unionists leaders and questioners seem not to have learned anything after the events of the past week.

Wall to wall running down Scotland and accusing the SNP of everything except perhaps genocide. Earlier I had rerun a video of a Holyrood debate about the Bifab yard probably losing out and the fabrication of the wind turbines for the wind farm off the mouth of the Forth being built across the other side of the World and shipped round the globe to Scotland.

The way the unionists, and particularly the Tories and Willie Rennie, had it the fault was all due to the SNP.

The unionists were gubbed in the EU elections and anyone being handed that sharp lesson would have realised their past tactics were leading to their total wipe out in Scotland and instead of changing tack they stick with the same tactics and step up the attacks.

Do they not realise they are the ones causing their decline – not the SNP. So it is madness to keep doing what doesn’t work for them.

The people, the voters, at least the bulk of them, are full of praise for the SNP yet these numpties, in spite of being often invited by the FM to work with the SNP for a better Scotland, step up the bitter attacks, the public know are bullshit, and further lose the public’s support.

Help me. I’m phobic

I think I’ve lived too long. I find these activists repetitive and boring now.

Repetetive Darn it.

“Off topic – For those more into politics than gender issues.”

Sorry but I’m honestly surprise at the crassness of that comment.

The Effects of Confusing Sex and Gender

When we allow the misuse of words, or blur the meanings of words important to our movement, and to radical politics in general, we are weakening our position.

Though sex is biological, legitimately dichotomous except in rare instances of intersex individuals: female or male, gender is entirely contrived. Gender is a construct of, and for the benefit of, patriarchy: masculine or feminine. Even the World Health Organization, hardly a bastion of feminist sensibility, is (sometimes) clearer on sex and gender (see also Note (1)):

“Sex” refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define
men and women.

“Gender” refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities,
and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and
women.

link to forestgreenfeminism.wordpress.com

This is an important political issue and one that directly affects 50% of the population i.e. those born female.
Changes in policy in public services such as the NHS, Prisons, schools, volunteer organisations and charities (forced in cases where funding is dependent on allowing transgender women with male bodies access to refuges, rape crisis centres etc.) put women at risk.

It goes way beyond toilets and changing rooms though that is bad enough. Someone has to stop this madness and I think it is legitimate for a political blog to raise it.

We all have to understand what is being done, often in secret, to remove the rights of women in Scotland. So Stu is quite right to point out the storm of abuse that many women and men are now subjected to for stating the most basic biological facts.

@geeo says:
30 May, 2019 at 2:28 pm

Stu mac@2.12pm

Oh right, so because i choose to respect everyone’s decision to live their life, as they see fit, as i get on with living mine, and feel no need to get involved in their lives, issues with stuff leading from their life choices/situations, then YOU attack ME for MY view in regards to that ??

NO. 1) I didn’t attack you. I stated you had missed the point. A list of areas where really nasty attacks are made for no good reason and you go on about live and let live? I actually presumed you had missed the point and hadn’t understood the issue. However it seems you maybe did and and are fine with folk being subjects of abuse and untruths defended and promulgated in the nastiest way.

So sorry, was i not fucking offended enough for you?
Should i be offended/bothered, just to please you ?
Away and shite.

Oh? Seems you’re fine with the kind of abuse the REv’s attacking, here it is from you – and I’ve noticed you giving it out to other posters here.

Because i take that view, DOES NOT mean i do not understand the issues ffs.

If true then you’re fine with all those folk being attacked on line .. seeing the way you seem to respond to something of a mild statement (i.e that you might have missed a point) I can understand it. Or maybe you just have anger issues?

NB Please note, I’ve not replied to your abuse in kind.

@stu mac.

By TELLING me what i think, rather than listening to it, you are forcing YOUR opinion of my words upon me.

That is an attack.

I know my views, and i explained them in great detail.

If you do not like that, then tough titty.

If you want to know my view, fucking ask me, but do not presume it for me.

I never agreed with anyone, i stated it has never affected ME so i steer clear.

That does not mean i agree with negative things trans activists are doing.

You do not have the right to presume my non disclosed views for me.

I do not do that to you, do I ?

Now feck off and go talk for yourself.

P.s. from the perspective of cultural anthropology, states are masculine and nations feminine. Ergo, One Nation British nationalism is a form of misogynistic rational paternalism.

@Noel Darlow says: 30 May, 2019 at 4:52 pm:

” … Mr Campbell is once again displaying his ignorance of gender issues.”

That’ll be in your humble opinion, of course, Noel?

Now I’m in no way the kind of guy who is biased against any human being as to me there is only one race. It is called the human race.

This lot strike me as acting like gangsters and if it wasn’t this issue they were espousing they’d invent one.

@geeo 4.12 pm

Caster Semenya is 46xy DSD

link to academic.oup.com

link to sportsscientists.com

yesindyref2@3.58pm
That’s the problem though.
While the FM has booted indy waaay down the road to a time when the political situation might lead to a S30 being granted, the hardcore feminists who have their hooks well and truly into the SNP can push their agenda knowing they have NS full attention with indy out of the way.
I’m all for waiting for the right moment but beginning to seriously wonder what the priorities are.

This has nothing to do with “hard core feminists” – quite the opposite. The baseball bats in the photo are often accompanied by fantasies of vicious attacks on feminists – called TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). This is a hard core anti feminist movement.

For example:
There’s a limit to the relevance of reproductive physiology.

Not of you are born female. It is usually used to define your entire existence. Alabama is a good example ATM.

Noel Darlow
I’m open to queerness, it’s just I’m concerned with protecting the internal linkages between biology, equity and human rights. Self-ID of sex will disrupt the coherence of legal doctrine and harm the cultural foundations of human meaning. That does not appear a reasonable cost for the appeasement of misogynistic narcissism, IMHO.

Sex Differences in the Adult Human Brain:
Evidence from 5216 UK Biobank Participants

Abstract

Sex differences in the human brain are of interest for many reasons: for example, there are sex differences in the observed prevalence of psychiatric disorders and in some psychological traits that brain differences might help to explain. We report the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain (2750 female, 2466 male participants; mean age 61.7 years, range 44–77 years).

Males had higher raw volumes, raw surface areas, and white matter fractional anisotropy; females had higher raw cortical thickness and higher white matter tract complexity. There was considerable distributional overlap between the sexes.

Subregional differences were not fully attributable to differences in total volume, total surface area, mean cortical thickness, or height. There was generally greater male variance across the raw structural measures. Functional connectome organization showed stronger connectivity for males in unimodal sensorimotor cortices, and stronger connectivity for females in the default mode network.

This large-scale study provides a foundation for attempts to understand the causes and consequences of sex differences in adult brain structure and function.

Keywords: brain volume, cortical thickness, fMRI, sex differences, surface area

link to ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

“72. Gendering cats is transphobic.”

Best not mention then that my boy cat has a blue name tag on his collar and my girl cat has a pink name tag.

And Lynsey Sharp is a TERF (and a racist) apparently.

link to dailydot.com

link to dailymail.co.uk

The English/American language is a veritable minefield. So called ‘politically correct’ language is stunting discourse, argument, debate and deriding alternative opinion. The language is being totalitarianised. Such a process happened to Nazi German, Soviet Russian and Maoist Chinese. The fact that this is occurring under self-defining democratic systems is more than troubling.
A brave new western world, especially social media, is seemingly populated by the immature, the gobby, the self-obsessed and the pedlars of unreason. The saying ‘empty vessels make make most sound’ incarnate.
In the culture I came from they’d be eaten alive, poor things.

Interesting post by Morag on the Week in the War on Women thread re Semenya – see also the post immediately above it:

link to wingsoverscotland.com

Noel Darlow
I think this article address your point particularly well. Full text.

Queer Genes: Realism, Sexuality and Science

Abstract

What are ‘gay genes’ and are they real? This article looks at key research into these hypothesized gay genes, made possible, in part, by the Human Genome Project. I argue that the complexity of both genetics and human sexuality demands a truly critical approach: one that takes into account feminist epistemologies of science and queer approaches to the body, while putting into conversation resources from agential realism and critical realism.

This approach is able to maintain the agential complexity of genetic materiality, while also critically challenging the seemingly stable relationships between sex, gender and sexuality.

keywords: agential realism, critical realism, feminist standpoint epistemologies, gay genes, queer, situated knowledges

link to tandfonline.com

Oh jeez how will I get to the shops for groceries without being transphobic. Best just to crawl back under the duvet.

Saw somebody on Twitter say that Politics and things have gone tits up (wonder i am offending there) since the Large Hadron Collider at Cerne went into operation.
He was joking but may have a point 🙂

There is a poll on the Dundee Courier just now – https://www.thecourier.co.uk
scroll down and you’ll find it.

Nicola Sturgeon has said it would be a democratic outrage if a Second Indyref 2 was denied – do you agree or disagree?

Currently on 57% for no and 42% for yes after 1,900 votes

Noel Darlow

Ok so minds may not be gendered, but biology is and if a man who identifies as a woman doesn’t have ovaries then that person is a man. Correct?

And here’s some up-to-date thoughts on Roberto Unger and how his philosophy and legal thinking might help resolve the current confrontation between the interests of men’s rights and social equality.

On the Road to Radical Reform: A Critical Review of Unger’s Politics

Abstract

Two aims drive this essay. The first is to provide the reader with an accessible, yet relatively comprehensive, introduction to Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s social and legal theory. The second aim is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Unger’s most recent scholarship and to make some suggestions as to where he goes awry.

In particular, the author draws several parallels between the Ungerian enterprise and that of some feminists. The central motivation of the essay is to keep the critical conversation between male radicals and feminists open. To this end, the author posits the possibility of mutually beneficial contributions.

link to digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca

@HandandShrimp,

the sexing of skeletons is not as precise as our BBC historians and grave robbers like to portray,

like the `Richard III` skeleton in the car park or the 4000 year old `Ava` skeleton found in Caithness,

the atribution of sex to these skeletons fit the agenda more than the science,

worth a read,

`Research Article`
The Difficulty of Sexing Skeletons from Unknown Populations,

link to tinyurl.com

anyhoo,

how can a historian/grave robber, in todays `woke` world, sex a skeleton when the owner of the skeleton might have had a different view on their sexual identity,

not sure but i think the BBC grave robber Alice Roberts got herself in a bit of a twitter cul de sac with that conundrum.

If I practiced mysosgyny and excluded a trans person from my mysogyny could I then be accused of transphobia?
Gosh! This a social niceties mine field.

Meg merrilees says:

Nicola Sturgeon has said it would be a democratic outrage if a Second Indyref 2 was denied – do you agree or disagree?

So far, a majority of Courier fans saying, NO it wouldn’t be a democratic outrage.

Well, all I can say to those people is … what would you actually consider to be a democratic outrage?

They don’t want independence because they have some personal vested interests in the UK continuing. I can see that. However, I think it is morally reprehensible to be willing to cast aside democracy to get their own way.

Robert Peffers

link to youtube.com

Hud oan tae yer tackle , they tranphobe’s ur sneeky bastwards they go aboot in the night like Wee Wullie Winky stealing wee boys magic wands lol .

Meanwhile, back on Castor Semenya, a female athlete being run ot of athletics by the IAAF rather than trans activists, nutjob ones or chilled out ones….

She has taken her case to CAS (Court of Arbritation for Sport).

And frankly, she has a very strong case, since the IAAF very recently changed their rules to force female testosterone below a mandatory level decided by, well, mostly white middle aged men in suits (ducks for cover) to specifically defy the previous CAS precedent on female athletes/sportswomen, with high natural testosterone levels (hyperandrogenism)

…….

the court (CAS) suspended the practice of hyperandrogenism regulation used by the IAAF. The practice will be declared void if the organization fails to present better evidence by July 2017.

……

Members of the same clinical hormone evaluation team (Working for CAS) report there is NO EVIDENCE that innate hyperandrogenism in elite women athletes CONFERS AN ADVANTAGE IN SPORT.

Raised levels of testosterone have not been shown to give an unfair advantage to the athlete.

Scholars question whether this advantage can really be considered “unfair” if it is a naturally occurring and out of the control of the athlete.

For example, elite athletes have a greater aerobic capacity and endurance in comparison to the majority of people. 

The case has been criticized as showing vulnerability of women athletes to unnecessary medical interventions under duress, with no evidence of cheating and no evidence of athletic advantage.
……………

Castor looks like she has a very strong case to take to CAS, and will damn the attitude of the IAAF in the process.

CAS will not take lightly, the IAAF attitude of trying to circumvent their latest ruling on hyperandrogenism testing by simply changing the rules to suit themselves.

They (IAAF) were ordered to find better testing and when they couldn’t, but rather than comply with the CAS previous ruling on testing guidelines, have tried to ‘game’ the rules by changing the criteria.

CAS will not like their authority openly subverted by IAAF.

I expect Castor Semenya to win this case, and hope she takes her rightful place, unadulterated, back on the stage her talent deserves to be showcased.

This topic on Wings is partly about protecting womens rights against aggressive trans activism, yet when i highlight that an international athletics body is actively TELLING WOMEN athletes how much testosterone they are ‘allowed’ to be considered a FEMALE athlete, i have been attacked for it, and by at least one woman !!

Its a funny old world huh ?

Mike Cassidy@7.21pm

Exactly right, there are NO sex testing guidelines never mind testing, for male athletes.

They remade Xfiles?

Well it says now after my vote.

Thank you for voting!
No
56.73% (1,075 votes)

Yes
43.27% (820 votes)

Total Votes: 1,895

I wish I didn’t feel bound to being sensible, as there’s a lot of scope for humour with this nonsense (self-ID). Apparently though, this is what happens when I turn my back for a decade or three. Time for some Critical Realism? 🙂

Critical Realism, Gender and Feminism: Exchanges, Challenges, Synergies
link to tandfonline.com

why should someones right not to be offended trump my right to free speech

I had a wee chuckle at the Warriors comments upthread.

Surely folk posturing on the internet with axes, sledgehammers, and baseball bats in a threatening and intimidating behaviour towards others is wrong.
Maybe in Scotland we need to put together a threatening communications and an offensive behaviour to females act…

Identity politics compared to other social issues, costs little to implement. Therefore it is an easy and lost costly policy for political parties to jump on and garner support from wholly headed liberal sort who are the most politically active and able to ‘spread the message’ among undecided’s.

re: Comparisons of Warriors movie.

I’d suggest Bronx Warriors which is mashup of The Worriors, Clockwork orange, Escape from New York city and nearly every other associated movie of that genre which the jokers in the picture of this article would fit right into.

I’m a former Biomedical scientist specialising in Developmental Biology and I understand how sex determination works during development. I know Robin Lovell-Badge who discovered Sry, the male determination gene*. I also know how it works (it bends dna).

NOBODY can tell me people can become members of the opposite sex by self declaration.

I am not against Trans people. I am against TRA’s and the current assault on safe spaces and safeguarding of women and girls. I am brother to three sisters, father to two daughters and uncle to five nieces and their safety is a major matter to me. I need to know they are safe from predators like Karen White.

I am DEEPLY suspicious of the Queer Everything agenda and Mermaids’ attempt to sexualise children. I want the Tavistock gender clinic investigated properly, a major scandal is brewing there. Government and the regulators are supine. Brave psychiatrists have resigned from it rather than be complicit in the harms going on there.

Proper psychiatrists tell us homophobia is behind much Trans desire. If you are being bullied by classmates and/or your family for being same sex attracted declaring you are the other sex seems a good solution. You can fancy your girlfriend if you’re a boy.

Kids need to be told that all this will pass and they can be who they really are. Instead they are fed puberty blockers and encouraged to get desexed, irreversibly.

It is a fundamental tenet of modern medicine that just because you can treat something doesn’t always mean you should. The Tavistock seems to have forgotten this and the first principle of Hypocrates: First do no harm.

The SNP appear to be risk adverse at times, solid management, governing in the centre ground in order to instill confidence and build support for independence. Yet here they are promoting a policy that gets up the back of women, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Scientists, men with wives and daughters, sane people, and a lot of other demographics. A bit of a risk to take so that male lesbians have the right to get their tadgers out in female changing rooms. Madness.

Does this spell the impending break up of the Union?

Not the doomed UKGB+NI … the hitherto expansionist LGBTQIA+

Are the T’s going to declare UDI ?

They don’t seem to have much in common with any of the others, you could say that they were the “odd men out”…but be sure to don a vitriol proof suit before you do.

What about the P’s? Will the P’s get back into the fold?

Although they have been ostracized of late, they still have a lot of friends in political circles and the fact that the medical profession (motto – first do no harm) is permitted to manufacture T’s, is proof that with a bit of Orwellian Newspeak,
Anything is possible.

@ ronnie – I get it ronnie, although I believe it’s really “click-through” rates which boost MSM income i.e. people then clicking on adverts.

The few thousand who click on the poll aren’t going to make the Courier look much more popular than it is. So I balance the aim of boosting the YES vote against giving the Courier a small, but economically unimportant, boost in visits.

There has been mixed changing rooms in swimming pools etc for years. With absolutely no problems. There are separate cubicles and family changing rooms. It is absolutely no problem. There could be separate unisex toilets. Without much problems. A variety so people could use what they like. There are unisex toilets, separate cubicles, in many restaurants and cafes. Especially smaller ones. No problems,

re. harm, the avoidance of which is a key tenant of administrative law. IMHO, the Scottish government would be negligent in meeting the needs of its’ duty of care to Scotland’s public, if self-ID is not abandoned out-right. What on earth are the civil service playing at, proceeding on the basis that “sex” is undefined in law?

The Policy/Operational Distinction:
What Would an Administrative Lawyer Do?

* This is a second extract from a forthcoming essay of mine on the policy/operational distinction in Canadian tort law, “The Policy/Operational Distinction – A View from Administrative Law“. Download a draft here. See my first extract, a post on the Imperial Tobacco case, here *

An administrative lawyer is comfortable in recommending that the policy/operational distinction should be abolished. Yet the idea that it would be unfair in some instances to impose liability for difficult decisions taken in difficult decision-making contexts is one to which someone mindful of contemporary administrative-law jurisprudence would nonetheless be sympathetic.

Administrative law’s rejection of absolutism gives rise to two possibilities: one, that the policy/operational distinction could be subsumed into the other stages of the duty of care analysis; two, that it could be taken into account in assessing whether the government agency discharged its standard of care.

Duty of Care: a Holistic Approach

If courts took an administrative law approach to state liability, the claims of the policy/operational distinction to categorically exclude some decision-making from liability would not be given absolute effect. Rather, the “policy considerations” they embody would be treated as one factor in the analysis, weighing against the imposition of a duty of care. They would have a relative value, not an absolute value. If other considerations weighed strongly in favour of liability, a duty of care would be imposed.[1]

For example, in Imperial Tobacco, the potential ‘chilling’ effect on government officials who wish to explore harm-reduction strategies does not seem to outweigh the repeated exhortations to the tobacco industry to travel down the soft-tar cigarette path.

But policy considerations might sometimes be weightier. Brown is an example of a case in which a court might legitimately be concerned that the imposition of liability in respect of a negotiated work schedule would pose difficulties for future relationships between public authorities and unions. Here, the prospect of an undesirable ‘chilling’ effect seems plausible.

Standard of Care

Administrative law presents a second possibility: that the “policy considerations” underpinning the policy/operational distinction could be addressed at the second stage of the negligence analysis, in determining whether the government agency met the required standard of care.[2] I do not suggest that establishing that the decision in question was unlawful, unreasonable or procedurally unfair should be made a condition precedent to a finding of liability; this is a matter for administrative law rather than the law of tort.[3] Rather, I suggest that awareness of administrative law concepts may assist courts in determining whether a public authority has met its standard of care.

The concept of the “range” of reasonable outcomes can expand or contract by reference to economic, social and political considerations. As Stratas J.A. has explained:

In some cases, Parliament has given a decision-maker a broad discretion or a policy mandate – all things being equal, this broadens the range of options the decision-maker legitimately has. In other cases, Parliament may have constrained the decision-maker’s discretion by specifying a recipe of factors to be considered – all things being equal, this narrows the range of options the decision-maker legitimately has. In still other cases, the nature of the matter and the importance of the matter for affected individuals may more centrally implicate the courts’ duty to vindicate the rule of law, narrowing the range of options available to the decision-maker.[4]

One might add Binnie J.’s suggestion that the “highest standard of deference” is presumptively appropriate when reviewing exercises of discretion by high-level executive officers. In Mount Sinai Hospital Centre v Québec (Minister of Health and Social Services),[5] the minister’s remit to regulate in the public interest favoured

…a high degree of deference, as does the expertise of the minister and his advisors, not to mention the position of the minister in the upper echelon of decision makers under statutory and prerogative powers. The exercise of the power turns on the minister’s appreciation of the public interest, which is a function of public policy in its fullest sense.[6]

A decision-making process must also bear the hallmarks of justification, transparency and intelligibility, but these too depend on context. For example, in the case of a municipal taxation by-law, adopted after public debate rather than an adjudicative hearing, the appropriate question for the court to ask was whether the by-law was one that a reasonable municipal authority could adopt.

Deferential review, in the form of a reasonableness analysis that is context-dependent, allows the intensity of judicial review to be reduced in appropriate cases. To borrow from an English commentator: “[i]t is the variable standard of deference which allows the courts to afford a degree of respect to the decisions of elected bodies and which has come to mean that while action taken at what might have been called the fringes of justiciability may be reviewable per se, it may not necessarily be subject to intensive review in practice”.[7]

As McLachlin C.J. put it in Hill, recognizing a tort of negligent police investigation, “[a] flexible standard of care appropriate to the circumstances” can be imposed instead of excluding tort liability altogether on the basis of policy considerations.[8] No floodgates would be burst open by such an approach.[9]

link to administrativelawmatters.com

Just a thought.

Will this be the first and last time a 100 per cent female squad represent Scotland at the Women’s World Cup Finals?

The Scottish government conducted a consultation on changing the GRA last year. It turns out that the civil servants administering the process changed the wording of the documents to remove definitions of sex and gender, eliding the meaning of both.

This was done after they were lobbied by the Equality Network group.

link to threadreaderapp.com

Re changing rooms. There have been pools on Hampstead Heath since 1920s. There is a men’s pool, a mixed pool and a women’s pool. After a consultation conducted by Edward Lord, the women’s pool is now open to trans women who SelfID.

Edward Lord is a man who SelfIDs as non-binary. He is a freemason as a man because the freemasons exclude women. His consultation received 40,000 replies. However, 20,000 were disallowed because they didn’t accept the terminology. Hence the majority for allowing male bodied trans women into the women’s pool and changing rooms.

link to archive.fo

It’s obvious that we have to take the results of consultations with a massive pinch of salt.

“I’m open to queerness” means I live and let live, or I take a “whatever floats your boat” stance. However, allowing self-ID would be seriously bad law. The more I think about the conduct of the civil service, the more I’m certain they need to answer serious questions

REGULATORY NEGLIGENCE and
ADMINISTRATIVE LAW
link to ciaj-icaj.ca