> Your trick is ignoring the stronger argument which is it's very likely that a trans woman will get pregnant after a uterus transplant at some point during our lifetime.
Harvesting the uterus of a woman and hosting it inside a man does not make him a member of a female sex.
Even if a womb was lab-grown somehow, rather than poached, it's highly unlikely his body would be compatible with pregnancy. And there would be massive ethical concerns in performing this experiment, given that this is an attempt to artificially create and grow a new human life in a body fundamentally unsuited to this task.
The only reason that redefinitions such as this are being proposed (and in many places, accepted) is so that some men can claim to be women, and to twist law and policy around such claims.
So, as a consequence of this, we now have men in women's prisons, men in women's sports, men in women's shelters, and so on. Is this really a beneficial concession to be made?
That is disgusting, but sadly not unexpected these days. The elephant in the room is that many 'transwomen' identify as so because of sexual fetishism; these men want to become the pornified image they have of women.
It's easily witnessed in their forums, for example the 'MtF' subreddit, there are countless posts of men asking if it's normal to be sexually aroused while cross-dressing, fetishising their own breasts, talking about their longing to be a 'hot woman', and so on.
"There are several crucial differences between biological and adoptive parents, on the one hand, and transwomen and women, on the other hand. These include:
- that both biological and adoptive parents actually parent, whereas it’s not at all clear what transwomen and women have in common that is supposed to play this same role;
- that there is no historical power relationship between biological and adoptive parents, whereas there is between male and female people;
- that calling adoptive parents parents doesn’t undermine our understanding of what it is to be a parent because what is core to parenting — raising children — is done by both, whereas what is core to being a woman is being female, and that is not done by both;
- there is no established history of adoptive parental violence against biological parents, whereas there is an established history of male violence against women;
- that adoptive parents do have ‘similar enough concerns and interests’ to biological parents, but transwomen do not have these to women (especially considering the heterogeneity among transwomen);
- that there is no ‘oppressive ideological agenda of parenthood’ but there is of being a woman (namely being feminine); and finally,
- that there are many ways to be a bad parent, which we can probably agree on, but there are no ways to be a bad woman."
I feel sorry for Cloudflare's management team in having to deal with all this nonsense.
What they really want to focus on is growing their business, developing new cloud-scale technologies, and serving their customers the best they can.
Instead they've ended up stuck in this ridiculous online spat between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals.
If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
> between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals
This is a bit too much "both sides are bad" for me. Fact is that Kiwi Farms is a horrible website where people harass others, share information about them, and drive them to suicide. That's pretty bad on its own.
Look at it from Cloudflare employees' point of view though. Do they really want to spend their time getting drawn in to any more of this trivial online drama? No, of course not. Pulling the plug is the sensible business decision.
Whether foo and bar will get married is, in my opinion, considerably different from organizations that collect and magnify hatred against members of various disempowered groups.
Are transwomen creators really disempowered online these days? The internet's a very different place from how it was in 2007.
Contrapoints, Gigi, Maya Henry were the first three that came to mind and from what I've seen all have wildly successful online followings, and a literal army of Twitter and Discord users to come to their defense. KF is the only site I'm aware of that bullies trans people, but I can think of loads of popular accounts and forums that happily go after Republicans, depressed single men, Christians, and any other group which the online majority has decided is deserving of abuse. I think the take "trans people have a hard time being accepted online" is pretty outdated now.
Seems to me Transwomen didn't get deplatformed. Quite the opposite.
Seems to me that Transwomen just took the only scrutiny contrary to their own agenda temporarily off the net, putting one of the most technically competent hosting providers on the list of people who won't associate with them (people acting in opposition to Transwomen).
No comment on the hating on black people, as I learned long ago, platforms are not users of platforms, and horrible people can be found everywhere.
Despite all of this horribleness that apparently goes on with KiwiFarms, it still seems Transwomen is able to go on doing whatever it is it does.
Strictly speaking, your yardstick for empowerment measurement has a rather funny operating principle, as intuitively speaking, I'd expect the opposite result.
Horrible people appear to be found at significantly above background density among posters on Kiwi Farms.
My comment about transwomen being disempowered is in the broader social sphere, where trans people in general are under social and legislative threat against their access to basic decency, public visibility, and medical care.
The problem is that if you give in once, or are perceived to give in, then not only will both sides hate you for it, but you will be under even more pressure to give in next time.
To run something like Cloudflare you probably have to have the rule that you will not block services for anyone under any circumstances unless ordered to by a court, or they advocate for a blocking campaign against you, or host content that does. In this case they would have let kf of, but block Twitter.
I don't get it. Do trans people and women and all the alleged victims "are a part of that community" that they endured years of torture and talking down leading to suicide as is being alleged or do these KF people do doxing on sorts on other sites and use KF as a central place to coordinate attacks?
I am not on 8chan. I can never be harassed by anyone in /b/ or whatever the bad that forums are.
If I am aan active part of a community, I should not claim peer pressure and influence or should I not?
...That's always going to exist. It's gone by different names. It's why you aren't supposed to share personal info on the Web, btw, because anyone can get to it, now without even leaving the comfort of home.
you know when the whole foursquare started gamification of locations, i did go into it pretty early on but some "time" later i was like "why am i doing this? for achievements?"
same for the whole gamification of your facebook profile which nudges you to give more and more info about yourself... the "connect your accounts" is terrible way of keeping watertight identities.
look. do you remember when "chatroom etiquette" meant not correctly answering a/s/l? because that would be creepy if the stranger found out and nasty things could happen?
i mean its easy to "connect" and tie everything to one identity but then that same identity means you cannot hide. its a tradeoff and one i personally am willing to give.
> If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.
Fair enough. But this CEO was blowing clouds in our face that they took this action because our legal system is not up to the task!
It's so sad that Mr. Prince apparently can't afford having a competent legal team to explain to him the concepts of "Rule of Law", "Due Process", "Courts", "Judges", "Juries", "Evidence", and all that other [quaint!] aspects of our (broken!) "traditional legal system".
If you are walking down the street, and see one person kicking the shit out of another, dial 911 to report it, and are told that the police will be there in 5 minutes, is it vigilantism to step in and break the fight up, or try to physically restrain the attacker? Given that the victim might sustain a severe or life-threatening injury in that 5 minutes?
Would stepping in be an indictment of "rule of law", "due process", "courts", "judges", "juries", "evidence", and support a claim that our traditional legal system is "broken"?
If you perceive an imminent threat to a third party, and have reason to believe that it might take the police too long to respond (simply because they can't be everywhere, all at once, and if they turn up ASAP guns blazing then that's how you get SWATting), do you think a good citizen should just look on and conclude that said third party is just having the worst day today, and it's a shame nobody could have prevented it?
Was that person getting physically kicked the shit out of?
I see exchanges of meta-information, recognized by courts of law to be public, and hear nothing of actual physical violence.
You do not, however go, and put someone in a sleeper hold, or call a construction company to come pull out the chunk of sidewalk a fight is occurring on. Also, if you have someone going and publically antagonizing another group, the general approach is inform LE, and caution the one on the receiving end to keep their head down.
If all they do is make themself more of a target, no amount of legal system or police force will protect them. If they scale their being a target beyond their capability to defend themselves from those that would target them, well... Society tends to self-correct through violence, in case you hadn't noticed. Learning "where thine chicanery will not be tolerated" is kinda part of the whole surviving in civilization shtick.
Mind, I've been on the recieving end of that Good Samaritanism. I pay it forward every chance I get. If you think I didn't learn to take care of myself better though, you're barking up the wrong tree.
I don't get it. Why does Prince require a legal team to explain to him the rule of law? Everything he has done in this matter has been within the letter of the law.
"A little bit geek, wonk, and nerd. Repeat entrepreneur, recovering lawyer and former ski instructor. CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare."
And oh my God. He is "recovering lawyer".
This is what he concluded with:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government."
So this exactly the reasoning of those (bad? good?) cops that beat suspects in alley, or conduct search on private property without a warrant.
And this cop then turns around and says:
"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than your civil rights"
The term for this type of action is Extrajudicial -- possibly our recovering lawyer remembers that from law school.
To repeat, Cloudflare has every right (afaik) to just say "bad client, we don't want you". This CEO however chose to frame this as some sort of civic virtuous action necessitated by alleged failings of our "traditional legal systems".
The statements made by any company representative responding to PR crisis shouldn't be taken as the unvarnished truth. The purpose is reputation management, dampening negative publicity before it overwhelms, while hopefully minimising long-term reputational damage.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to observe the sex in most of these cases though, it just takes more than a quick visual check to determine.
The really tricky cases are where the individual has reproductive organs of mixed types, particularly where it involves some sort of genetic mosaicism or chimerism. These ones are where we could reasonably say that sex is only assigned and not observed, but it's very rare. Rarest of all is where someone could be plausibly regarded as both female and male.
Generally, I think it's best to avoid the terminology of "assigned at birth", because it comes with the implication that sex can be arbitrarily reassigned. Something like "incorrectly observed" would be better, in cases where a mistake has genuinely been made.
> Women in prison are sexually assaulted, raped, and even impregnated by men all the time and have been for years. Those men are guards.
Indeed and this is why feminist organizations, and others with an interest in women's rights and safety, push for policies of only employing female prison guards in women's prisons.
It's no stretch to see why they don't want male prisoners to be incarcerated there too, no matter how such males identity.
If the male guards can't be trusted not to sexually abuse women, how can you expect the same from cohabiting males?
