a criticism of “you’re not strict enough to actually find all the things” is not an argument against attempting to find all the things.
'The methods you are using cannot possible product the outcomes that need to have happen if your purpose was real, but it is not' is, indeed, a pretty good argument against funding a part of the government that is incredibly invasive.
2) the things the TSA actually does effectively filter for – articles hidden in shoes, liquids in quantity – actually could substantially affect an aircraft in a term short enough to be relevant.
The TSA is not 'effectively filtering liquids in quantity' at all, mostly because of the incredibly obvious fact that multiple people can just carry liquids through and put them together on the other side. You don't even have to cheat!
Meanwhile, cheating is trivial. You can get much larger amounts of liquids (Which you can then combine to make even more) just by signing a doctor's note that they are medically required, which is trivial. I recommend insulin so they won't check it...
...granted, I have no idea what you're even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely 'a state of matter' and thus is not inherently dangerous.
As for shoes, firstly, we do not screen quite a lot of people's shoes to start with. Secondly, there are quite a few ways to alter things to hide 10 ounces of plastic explosives such that they would be undetected by x-ray machines. If we actually wish to stop that, we need to do better nitrate detection, including airborne.
That actually _would_ be something useful for airport security, but we don't do useful things, we do stupid things that assume that attackers are going to use literally, word-for-word, the same attack as last time.
That’s your spin on their spin on an amendment that won’t pass.
NOW is one of the strongest supporters of the ERA, from the very beginning. And it doesn't matter if it has not chance of passing, we're not talking about what has a chance of passing, we're talking about 'what feminist organizations want'. NOW, extremely clearly, wants the ERA passed. That has been the position of NOW _always_.
And the ERA would not allow, or at least create a very _very_ high bar, to women's sport existing.
Basically, under the ERA, the government would have to prove there is a compelling government interest to having competitive sports at all, (Which is not clear to start with. Athletics, yes but that doesn't mean sports), _and_ also prove that the only way to fill that need would be gender segregated sports, as opposed to just having sports that do not need gender segregation.
And 'men do better' is not going to fly there, there'd have to be _actual safety concerns_...and there would have to be a reason that universities could not just switch to sports without those safety concerns to do whatever the government said they were trying to do with sports.
This, literally, what the ERA would do, it is what it is intended to do, to move 'laws based on sex' up the same level as 'laws based on race'. This is not actually confusing.
Hell, the entire reason the ERA didn't pass (At least, some people say it didn't.) is that the people opposing it pointed literally this out. Not about sports, but about _restrooms_. The Federal and state governments would literally not be allowed to have sex segregated restrooms under the law unless they could meet a pretty high bar...which, for the record, they maybe could meet with restrooms (by lying about safety), but with sports, they'd also have to prove the sport needed to exist _at all_, that there wasn't some other way off accomplishing whatever compelling government interest was there. (At least with restrooms, you can sorta start with the idea that government restrooms are needed.)
So I find your response incredibly silly. Yes, NOW, a major (Arguably, the leading-mainstream) feminist organization want to remove women's sports. Or, more accurately, remove the sex segregation of sports. Even if they are not particularly open about it.
Oh, here's a article about it:
https://www.mediaite.com/news/trumps-attempted-library-of-congress-takeover-thwarted-as-two-of-his-appointees-were-escorted-off-the-premises-cbs-news/
There is currently an internet rumor that DOGE is trying to get into the Library of Congress (Which is run by the legislative branch, not executive) and the Capitol Police (Also run by the legislative) is stopping them.
This is after Trump fired the head of the Library of Congress, which he apparently has the power to do, and supposedly appointed an acting director, which I am not clear he can do.
it is unclear what is actually happening at this point, but we'll see if Congress allows the executive to run roughshod over something _they_ own.
Do you see the word 'discriminatory' in there? Or how this was done by the EEOC?
Target set up assessments that the government alleged 'disproportionately screened out black, Asian, and female applicant'. And under Griggs v. Duke Power Co, the government doesn't have to prove discriminatory _intent_ if those assessments were 'not sufficiently job-related and consistent with business necessity', which the government also alleged.
This is...literally, word for word, what I just explained the standards were under Griggs, and I even added a caveat that while Griggs said 'functionally exclude', I kinda doubt the courts would currently be happy with something that stopped only 40% of Black applicants and 10% of whites, or whatever. You know, the exact situation that Target found themselves in.
In case people are not following:
You can give all the irrational tests you want, involving Legos or writing essays or whatever, _as long as_ they do not have discriminatory outcomes. If they do end up having a discriminatory outcome, it doesn't matter what your intent was. (Or, more relevantly to the law, the government doesn't have to _prove_ your intent.)
Lost in all this is this bit of stupidity: over what the president said was China’s failure to stop fentanyl-related chemicals from reaching the United States
Do you want to know how that actually works? Because it is astonishingly stupid. Here's the DEA explaining it: https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States_0.pdf
So, there a dozen different precursor chemicals for fentanyl, including a lot with legitimate medical uses.
China makes those chemicals, and ships them either to Mexican labs, or hilariously, to the US, where they then smuggled out to Mexican labs. (Yes, they are mailing drug precursors into the US, and then having to smuggle them _out_.) They are then turned into fentanyl, and smuggled back into the US, almost entirely though legitimate ports of entry with specially built vehicles using professional couriers , the majority of which are probably US citizens at this point.
You'll notice that China is barely involved in this, and moreover, their role is completely replaceable. In fact, India has already started to replace it. And by 'already started', I mean the DEA link there is explaining how they had started back in 2018. In fact, they may have already moved somewhere else besides India.
Fentanyl is sorta the ultimate logical conclusion of the drug war: A substance so potent that it has incredible bang for the buck (And thus incredibly easy to accidentally overdose on) and is made from precursors that even smaller. This is, literally, an unwinnable fight.
The best we can possible do is stop the _Mexican_ labs from turning the precursors into the real thing, which would be incredibly hard. That would require wrestling control of parts of Mexico away from the drug cartels (Which neither us or the Mexican government has been able to do for decades) or locking the border down almost completely to _legitimate_ travel. At which point the drug network would just switch to the illegal side and start using that. (Which it doesn't do now because people trying to sneak into the US for jobs and disappearing into 'somewhere in the US where they can get a job' are rather less trustworthy than American citizens in San Diego that makes a trip every Sunday and takes a standard cut and they can show up at the house of and break their legs if the drugs go missing.) So we have to lock _that_ down, also. We're like three impossible things deep at this point.
And that will just mean we start running the labs here. Which, as all the meth labs demonstrate, we are certainly willing to do. And we will do very poorly, making even more erratic quality, killing even more people.
There really is not, in any manner, a solution here. Drugs have won the drug war.
The thing we need to start thinking about is the thing we _should_ have been thinking about decades ago: Reducing the circumstances, both economic and social, where people turn to hard drugs, providing a place for them to be safe, providing _softer_ drugs so they don't go 'all the way', and providing a way back.
Because what we cannot do is magically stop them from having access if they want them.
Than the Palestinian leadership should negotiate with the Israeli government rather than go on quixotic quests to destroy Israel.
The Palestinian leadership has not gone on any quest to destroy Israel, and has in fact been unable to get Israel to even _stop stealing West Bank land_ for the past two decades, which is an obvious prerequisite to even discussing any sort of agreement.
I understand that is what people quote from it, and seem to think it says, but that sentence is completely out of context. The context is that it is the second of two sentences:
Even if there is no discriminatory intent, an employer may not use a job requirement that functionally excludes members of a certain race if it has no relation to measuring performance of job duties. Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job.
For more context, Griggs v. Duke Power Co is a holding about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Which only cares about discrimination. If the first sentence is not true, if there is no discriminatory outcome, the second sentence is completely irrelevant. Employers can require prospective employees do literally anything (Not barred elsewhere by law) as long as the outcome doesn't 'functionally excludes members of a certain race'.
And notice how strong that qualifier is. It's not even 'impacts more the members of a certain race'. It has to functionally exclude members of a certain race. Or, presumably, functionally exclude other categories protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
This ruling is pretty much entirely about intent. It says 'You cannot set up unrelated tests that unintentionally discriminate. The fact it is unintentional does not matter.'. It is not intended to, surreally, bar all irrelevant employment tests from existing...the court cannot magically make a law about that! What would that even be illegal under?
(I do suspect they'd have a problem with mere disparate impact now, but Griggs v. Duke Power Co doesn't say it.)
This means that the final settlement would be Israel vanquishing the Palestinians, which would be morally horrible, Israel unilaterally deciding the borders of a Palestinian state, or a negotiated deal.
Israel not only isn't offering the last option, they're not even offering the second.
I have no idea what point you think you are making.
TSA repeatedly fails _accidental_ penetration testing, in that they allow people to fly with prohibited things all the time. By accident, not hidden.
They also notable do not punish people for attempting to fly with prohibited things, which is...very stupid if the goal is to stop getting prohibited things on planes. The TSA also does not bother to keep track of how many times people 'accidentally' tried to take box cutters through.
Put that together with their absysmal track record of actually detecting things, and literally any idiot with a few thousand dollars can get a box cutter on a plane...all they have to do is _keep trying_ via cheap flights. Oh, let me just constantly book a bunch for cheap-last minute flights and I'll try to walk a box cutter on 'by accident' each time, and I'll manage it, statistically, by flight 10 or so. (If someone needs it on a specific flight, they just have to do this in advance and find a hiding place at the airport where they can keep it until then.)
And you may notice that 'Just use multiple flights and hide stuff' is, uh, pretty obvious a way to get large amounts of liquids through, although that restriction is so inherently stupid no one even pretends it matters.
This discussion topic is about parts of the government that are failures, and the TSA is, as set up, is about as objectively a failure as it is possible for a government agency to be...they have literally one job, a job stopping a thing from happening, and any idiot who wishes to make that happen _could trivially do so_.
It's just, no one really wants to.
(This is on top of the fact it's probably impossible to stop razor blades but allow electronic devices, since people could just, ya know, hide them pretty easily in electronic devices. But no one has to!)
As for knives and poky-tools, maybe the reason they don’t care as much about those is just what was pointed out earlier–that locking the cockpit door leaves you completely protected from such items, at least for the time it would take to call in an emergency.
Pointing out that what the TSA is trying to do is utterly pointless is a very strange way to defend the fact they are a complete failure at doing what they are trying to do.
Like, sure, the entire premise of their existence is moronic to start with, which is good, because they are not actually fulfilling it.
Which I also recall was met with a lot of cries of, “That’s your job, Mr. President!”
I don't remember that at all.
That's a pretty stupid objection. Yes, that is part of the president's job, but the president only functions because he has literally dozens of advisors doing a first-pass over things to bring certain things to his attention and let him ignore other things.
Having someone whose job is 'weird interactions and redundancies in policy' seems entirely reasonable. Honestly, I feel like that should actually be a white house office, where every department has representatives in it who can say to other department's representatives 'Hey, have you noticed that our two Departments have nearly identical definitions of X, and it probably would make sense to make them _actually_ word-for-word identical?' and things like that.
Which left me asking, “Well, isn’t that the President’s job? Don’t we have a National Security Advisor and a National Security Council to help him with that?”
You think the _president_ should be handed a bunch of information about individual threats from the FBI and CIA and somehow integrate that? And coordinate the two? What?
The National Security Advisor and National Security Council are intended to talk to the _president_, they are not any sort of inter-agency communications.
Teachers are managed and licensed by the State, not the feds. All the educational forms I’ve ever gotten about my kids have also been State. You need the State’s permission to start a school, not the feds.
I didn't say they managed them, I said they had _information_ about them.
If I were drafted to run for president, my first policy position would — and this sounds odd, but I’m looking for votes — eliminate TSA and we’d go back to meeting Grandma at her gate when her plane arrived.
I always thought my proposal would be funnier and stop anyone from trying to implement that sort of moronic thing again, because the TSA is _so_ bad at their job:
Me, as president: *holds up a bright orange piece of metal* "This is a pentest box cutter. It is the same size and shape as box cutters, but cannot be used as a weapon. You can buy them from the government for $100. We also have a gun-shape piece of metal for $500, and just a razor-blade-shape for $20. They are for you to attempt to smuggle them onto planes. If you get caught, it will be confiscated and you will be out the purchase price. If you hand one of these to a flight attendant while in the air, you will get a voucher for the price of what you smuggled in x10, written out of the budget of the TSA. You cannot be punished by the TSA for this."
Sounds reasonable for a penetration test until you remember a) how hilariously bad the TSA is at their job, and b) how impossible and stupid their entire job is to start with. They'd start bleeding red. I just wish I could come up with some plausible method of judging liquid smuggling.
…which raises the immediate question of “why is this something the Department of Education is expected to do instead of FEMA?”
Well, the Department of Education has facts about every child educated in that area and every teacher, it knows what schools exist where, it knows how schools have to function and what is needed to make a school, etc, etc.
On top of that, when it doesn't know something factual, it's the authority to figure it out. For example, how much school can students miss, what special things need to be done when students are trying to cope with the possible loss of their home and being shoved into a new environment, etc.
If you want all that in FEMA, you're basically building a smaller Department of Education inside of FEMA that does _nothing at all_ and just sits there idle a good chuck of time.
Or you can have a dedicated department full of people who are experts in education who can put any long-term work aside in an emergency and deal with that, and then go back to doing other things.
It's worth reminding people that Departments are actually ways to _organize_ government programs, and we might be better off thinking of them like that, instead of 'a thing'.
Like, the Department of Education has emergency funds to allocate to education in disaster areas, for doing things like renting buildings and flying in teachers if schools are destroyed, along with longer-term grants to actually fix schools as part of national disasters. It's called the Disaster Recovery Unit, it actually was just formed in 2018, but that's because it was sorta distributed across the entire Department of Education before that.
Presumably, if we think we should care the Federal government responding to national disasters, someone probably needs to be thinking about education in all that. And if we are going to have anything else in the government doing education, it should probably be those people we ask. And having a Department for something like that seems to make sense.
But even if you think we shouldn't have a Department for Education, we still need to, uh, do that.
Another thing the Department of Education does: Education for Native American Tribes. Not only do they not have the tax base to do it themselves, we often have an obligation to fund education for them _under treaty_. (Let's try not to break even more treaties with them, shall we?)
Other departments make less sense and have weirder grouping. But even the ones that do not make sense and seem completely arbitrary, that doesn't mean anything.
Because that is thinking at the wrong level, it's like looking at a giant office building and decided to abolish the office building instead of offices or jobs. A Department is just a big collection of things we put next to each other. If we have too many things, or they aren't working well, the thing to do is to look at those things.
There are legitimate debates in the LGBTQ community about how much to allow different groups to be represented at Pride. This is often pretty...acrimonious. For example, I see Israeli flags in that picture saying 'Bring them home', (Which is apparently from that previous year.) That...I can see Pride having a problem with. Maybe. I don't know if they would, but I can imagine a world in which they do. Likewise, I can imagine a world where there's restrictions on Palestinian LGBTQ groups and what they can say in the Parade.
But that isn't what happened here. What happened here, apparently, is that KeshetUK was allowed in (As it should be in general, as what it said about the conflict seems completely reasonable.), and then random protestors deciding to attack Pride over that, to the point that groups has to leave for safety concerns.
I wish we knew how reasonable KeshetUK's requests were. Both sides have said they were not able to reach an agreement. What exactly was the sticking point?
But I will say: If you ever find yourself in a group organizing action against a Pride parade, to the point people feel unsafe, you're probably the baddies.
I’d think that’s exactly what we’d be concerned about.
Hey, what other group should we treat by statistics in prison? Just sex?
You are assuming trans-women prisoners behave like women and not men. In order to make that assumption you handwaved my various links as “misleading statistics” and didn’t supply any of your own (to be fair I can’t find any either).
Prisons are incredibly bad at keeping any statistics about violence they are not required by law to do. They are bad at literally every aspect of 'letting anyone know what is happening there'.
That doesn’t answer the issue on whether they behave more like men or like women as far as aggression is concerned.
Behave like women? In prison? Aka... more likely to rape someone in prison? https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/svpjri0809.pdf
Scroll down to page 12. The amount of rape from other inmates in men's prisons is 1.9%. The amount of rape from other inmate's in women's prisons is 4.7%. This report is from 2008, so trans people are not relevant to this.
Of course, that isn't because women are more aggressive than men, it's because of the opposite, Because women in prison are statistically a little different than men in a particular way. Specifically, women are way more like to be drug users, and abuse victims, and people basically victimized into crime. They often are sex workers, coerced or have no choice. (1)
In other words, women in prisons are more likely than men to be victims, and I don't mean they shouldn't be there, although that is often true. It is that 'being victimized' is sort of their role in life. And this obviously a spectrum, I'm not saying this is true of every woman, or no men, I'm saying, statistically, more women end in prison that way, or more likely to have 'abuse victim' as one of their traits.
And thus they are easier to be sexually victimized by more aggressive people.
And at this point, I hope a little voice in your head has gone 'Oh no', because you just said ' trans people are horrifically abused in general'. Yes, it's exactly what you think. This specific report doesn't have any statistics on trans people, but scroll down to page 13. People are nine times more likely to be sexually assaulted in prison if they are not straight.
Because, again, marginalized people who _end up in prison_ are often there due to constant victimization. And this includes queer people.
But, there are certainly aggressive trans women, although claiming that's 'behaving like men' is very silly. This is why it is up to the prison to make the determination.
Or maybe the results aren’t what we’d like to see? I see serious results on trans victimization but there’s nothing on the reverse.
It's weird that seems so uncommon, it's almost as if the trans women who would assault women in prison are the people who assaulted women _outside_ of prison and hence are very unlikely to be placed in women's prisons to start with! (Unlike cis female rapists, who go there and have plenty of women with a lifetime of victim mindset to abuse. Oopsie!)
But don't worry, I'm sure there are exactly three counter examples that exist, where the system did something dumb, and those three examples are repeated endlessly and pretending to be how everything works.
1) BTW, everyone will swear up and down that sex work will not land someone in prison, only people who pimp them out, that ignoring just how many tripwire laws there are that count as 'pimping'. It's a felony in maybe three different ways for two prostitutes to live together and share rent, for example.
You have made the claim that there is no legal reason to separate men and women. So yes, you were indeed arguing for intersex prisons.
If you want to know what I'm actually arguing for, it's not prisons.
Assuming prisons exist, my next level of argument is: Do not blatantly allow people in prison to commit more crimes while in prison against other people.
Assuming we cannot stop _that_ in general,for some reason, my argument is for what literally already exists: Making decisions about where individual prisoners belong based on those prisoners.
Some of my previous links included claims that trans-women who are prison inmates have sex crime rates a lot closer to what we’d expect for men than women.
Pssst: There is a giant billionaire backed operation that exists solely to produce misleading statistics in this manner. In actual reality, there are almost no meaningful statistics _at all_ on trans people and criminality. No one collects those.
It is also extremely unclear why we should care about 'statistical rate of sex crimes' when deciding where to send people. Do you know where there is gigantic spike in actual reported rapes? It's when trans women are in men's prisons. If we're going to care about anything, maybe the most obvious point?!
It appears the logic is 'Send the trans women to men's prisons, where there is near certainly they will be raped, instead of women's prisons, where they are not actually likely to rape but could'. (And ignoring all the other rape.)
Women who raped other women are more likely to rape other women in prison, should we send them to men's prison?
What sort of weird logic is all this?
How about we do everything in our power to reduce rape? Including allowing and even requiring the prison system to make decisions to keep people safe by sending people where it determines, individually, would be in reducing threats both from and to them?
Google's AI cannot agree or disagree with anyone. Google's AI is a computer program that strings plausible-sounding text together in such a way that it is statistically-likely English. But, sure, what part of what I said do randomly sentences that statistically look like real sentences object to?
Because it is very easy to demonstrate that the National Organization of Women supports the ERA, that's literally been a focus of theirs from the very start.
And it's pretty easy to understand that the ERA would no longer allow segregated sports team. There are plenty of conservative sites I could link to that explain this, as opposition. And...they're not lying there.
Of course, NOW will just ignore that. In fact, they very carefully do not say anything on that topic. They do say this, though: https://now.org/era-frequently-asked-questions/
The general objective of the amendment was to end legal distinctions between men and women as related to divorce, property, employment and other matters where government law and policy is involved.
Hmm. Also:
For the first time, sex would be considered suspect classification, as race currently is. Governmental actions that treat males or females differently as a class would be subject to strict judicial scrutiny and would have to meet the highest level of justification – a necessary and compelling state interest – to be upheld as constitutional.
Weird. It's almost as if they know it but aren't saying it.
Supporting a constitutional amendment that would outlaw the operation of women's sports teams (at least any governmental school or college) does, in actuality, seem to be 'against women's sports existing'.
If we assume that there are no performance differences between men and women on the field, then there is no reason to discriminate against trans athletes.
First, again, a lot of feminists argue that suspect that women are not doing as well simply because they are not provided the same support.
But, and I think I need to make this clear, even if these differences turn out to be inherent instead of support and training: Feminists (Or, at least, NOW, which is hardly some extremist organization) does not want laws to exist that treat men and women differently. Period. End of story.
They do not want laws that do that both as a matter of principle, and they don't want them because having such laws is unsafe for women! Those laws create a precedent that can be used against women. Usually under the justification of 'protecting women'.
And hey, it is! It's literally what's happening here, according to NOW. Not only against trans women, but the policing of all women in sports. Invasive checks and questions and accusations and racism. All because of segregated sports.
International Federation of Sports Medicine
What are you talking about? Why do we care about them?
You know, I deliberately tried to make this discussion not about trans people. Literally did not mention them, just pointed out how regulations trying to define what legal sex someone is can't really work. That sex actually is a spectrum, and it would be a spectrum even trans people did not exist, and there is no magical dividing line, something which has been pointed out for decades, but the Gender Critical movement always handwaves with 'That is a very small subset.'.
As I pointed out, I am fairly certain very small subsets of people need to know what bathroom they can use, or what sports they can play. They have to be sent to a specific prison. We do need to be able to sex literally every human that exists if we have laws based on sex.
Absolutely no one in this discussion has talked about that. And instead talked about trans people. A group of people I literally didn't mention.
People, just a basic observation here: You cannot even start to make the argument about where what prisons someone belong in or what sport teams people should be able to play on, based on sex, until you can demonstrate there is a functional legal method to decide sex. (Besides the current use of 'Just going with whatever arbitrary thing is written on their documentation'.)
If you cannot demonstrate that, it doesn't matter what rules you think different sexes should follow.
(This is, incidentally, why we generally do not base rights around people's biology. In fact, the one other place we base rights on biology is people's age, and that also is just 'whatever is written on their documentation'.)
Immigration is a place where the right, and Trump especially, holds extremist positions but manage to debate much more rational and sane positions as wedge issues. Often these rational and sane positions are _already the actual law_, or extremely close to them, but the negative-information voters have been misinformed about this.
For example, a lot of polls said that Biden should do more about illegal immigrants who committed serious crimes, with a perception that he had somehow done less than Trump. This is incredibly wrong as an understanding of the universe, and these polls then get presented as indicating that immigration should be harsher, and Republicans are doing better.
That is already how we did it! Biden actually upped deportation! We deported people who committed serious crimes. And we had voters go 'Well, of course people who are living here peacefully should be allowed to live here, even someday become citizens, but the government needs to start arresting illegal immigrants who commit serious crime! Better vote for Trump!'
This is not the only thing. Does anyone want to guess the prior rules about trans prisoners? The prior rules are 'They should be where the most people are safest, upon individual determination by the prison system'! We already didn't have a system where people could just 'claim to be' something, and then be legally required to be transferred!
We had it with abortion, where the right runs around for decades yammering about elective third-trimester abortions and how doctors are pulling living babies out and killing them, and how that should be illegal.
Over and over and over again, the right lies about stuff, pretending what is going on currently is insane, and proposes _what is already happening_, and voters got 'Holy crap, yeah, we need to stop the far left current government from doing made up thing and instead do the reasonable thing you all want!'
We are far, FAR past zero information voters, and so far into negative information, with no pushback or correction by the media that just happily both-sided us into this, that we eventually got Trump, and have essentially destroyed a good chunk of how this country work. A huge amount of the current electorate is operating in complete nonsense land, lead there by what is essentially Republican propaganda. I know there's going to be arguments here to me saying it, but it's true.
Well, a lot of Trump voters are now saying 'Wait, they changed the law to requiring beating puppies to death with shovels? They promised the reasonable compromise of letting puppies live but people could voluntarily get dogs spayed and neutered so less people would drown under puppy floods!' and everyone turns and looks at them and says 'That already was how it worked, you utter dumbass...also puppy floods are not a thing and don't kill people. That has never happened. Also also, Trump did not promise that reasonable compromise. He promised to beat puppies to death with shovels. He literally said it, on Truth Social, here's the image.' and they respond 'No! I mean, yeah, he said it, but everyone said he wasn't serious!'
A magazine article:
https://www.howwegettonext.com/is-gender-segregation-in-sports-necessary/
One from a legal direction:
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol95/iss5/13/
However, I feel you have misunderstood my response.
I claim is that feminists _did not want separate sports_. Feminists are not the reason those exist, they were never lobbied for by feminists, they often were enacted in direct opposition to what feminists were trying to do. They were seen as a compromise, one that feminists mostly went along with. (It was way, way, WAY more important to have, for example, bank accounts and laws against spousal rape.)
These sports are, at this point, pretty entrenched as a compromise, so generally feminists just work with that compromise existing. Spending time and effort trying to change them is pointless.
Ideally that would be women’s rights groups.
To be clear here, there is a difference between 'We are going to work within the law as it is, and if we urge changes, they are minor changes', which is what mainstream women's right groups do, and 'Feminist theory'.
If we're going to start listening to women's right groups like the National Organization of Women, we should probably just, more directly, listen to what they say about laws barring trans athletes from women's sports. https://now.org/blog/even-if-bigots-insist-it-is-waging-a-hate-campaign-against-trans-people-is-not-feminist/
Although, NOW is pushing for passage (and was always one of the main backers) of the ERA, and one of the right-wing attacks _on_ the ERA, back in the 70s, is that it would not allow separate 'women spaces', exactly like women's sports, and as a more deciding issue back then, women's restrooms. (Although then, as is now, it was pointed out we don't actually have laws about who can use what restrooms!)
No one has really come up with a reason why that interpretation would be incorrect, how such segregated categories could hypothetically be legal under the ERA. The ERA basically forbids the US government (and, by incorporation, state governments), from taking sex into consideration _at all_, and the government (including, for example, a local high school) would be exactly as unable to make a rule saying 'Women cannot play on the men's team, or vis versa' as they could make a rule saying 'Blacks cannot play on the white's team, or vis versa'.
So NOW is, in fact, lobbying for dissolving women's sports, and always done so. They just aren't _saying_ that. Because they rightly realized what a (moronic) hotbutton issue it was to have sex integrated teams, and NOW is doing respectability politics. (And the far-right decided to make it hot button issue about trans people anyway, and NOW, to their credit, pointed out idiotic that is.)
A lot of this comes down to whether or not one believes that womens’ equality depends in some part on separate accommodations for situations where women are particularly vulnerable.
It's almost the inverse, actually.
Or, to rephrase: A lot of this comes down to whether or not one believes that we can reach women's equality by concluding that we cannot actually solve any problems at all. To the extent of being unwilling to stop rape inside _entirely controlled-and-monitored facilities_, so we just have to throw up our hands and make sure that _one_ group doesn't rape women. (Guards raping women, a much larger problem, totally fine. Likewise, other women, totally fine.)
That is the totality of effort: In this one specific case, we are willing to physically stop this very particular sort of rape of some women by a certain specific group.
GO FEMINISM! *raises hands in victory sign* WOO!
Or, new idea: We should not have rape essentially running wild in prison. We should not have male prisoners raping other male prisoners , we should not have male prisoners raping female prisoners, we should not have male guards raping male or female prisoners, we should not have male prisoners raping trans female prisoners, we should not have female prisoners raping other female prisoners, we should not, in fact, have any of that happening at all.
Which is a thing we could trivially do.
Instead, we have built a system where it is happening openly and _encouraged_ by prison staff.
Hey, InMD, I said it to Dark, but did you happen to google v-coding? Do you know what that is? It's when prison guards reward a well-behaving prisoner, or just one that bribes them well, with a trans woman cellmate to rape.
On “The Department of Good Things”
'The methods you are using cannot possible product the outcomes that need to have happen if your purpose was real, but it is not' is, indeed, a pretty good argument against funding a part of the government that is incredibly invasive.
The TSA is not 'effectively filtering liquids in quantity' at all, mostly because of the incredibly obvious fact that multiple people can just carry liquids through and put them together on the other side. You don't even have to cheat!
Meanwhile, cheating is trivial. You can get much larger amounts of liquids (Which you can then combine to make even more) just by signing a doctor's note that they are medically required, which is trivial. I recommend insulin so they won't check it...
...granted, I have no idea what you're even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely 'a state of matter' and thus is not inherently dangerous.
As for shoes, firstly, we do not screen quite a lot of people's shoes to start with. Secondly, there are quite a few ways to alter things to hide 10 ounces of plastic explosives such that they would be undetected by x-ray machines. If we actually wish to stop that, we need to do better nitrate detection, including airborne.
That actually _would_ be something useful for airport security, but we don't do useful things, we do stupid things that assume that attackers are going to use literally, word-for-word, the same attack as last time.
On “Gender Critical: Legally Defining Sex”
NOW is one of the strongest supporters of the ERA, from the very beginning. And it doesn't matter if it has not chance of passing, we're not talking about what has a chance of passing, we're talking about 'what feminist organizations want'. NOW, extremely clearly, wants the ERA passed. That has been the position of NOW _always_.
And the ERA would not allow, or at least create a very _very_ high bar, to women's sport existing.
Basically, under the ERA, the government would have to prove there is a compelling government interest to having competitive sports at all, (Which is not clear to start with. Athletics, yes but that doesn't mean sports), _and_ also prove that the only way to fill that need would be gender segregated sports, as opposed to just having sports that do not need gender segregation.
And 'men do better' is not going to fly there, there'd have to be _actual safety concerns_...and there would have to be a reason that universities could not just switch to sports without those safety concerns to do whatever the government said they were trying to do with sports.
This, literally, what the ERA would do, it is what it is intended to do, to move 'laws based on sex' up the same level as 'laws based on race'. This is not actually confusing.
Hell, the entire reason the ERA didn't pass (At least, some people say it didn't.) is that the people opposing it pointed literally this out. Not about sports, but about _restrooms_. The Federal and state governments would literally not be allowed to have sex segregated restrooms under the law unless they could meet a pretty high bar...which, for the record, they maybe could meet with restrooms (by lying about safety), but with sports, they'd also have to prove the sport needed to exist _at all_, that there wasn't some other way off accomplishing whatever compelling government interest was there. (At least with restrooms, you can sorta start with the idea that government restrooms are needed.)
So I find your response incredibly silly. Yes, NOW, a major (Arguably, the leading-mainstream) feminist organization want to remove women's sports. Or, more accurately, remove the sex segregation of sports. Even if they are not particularly open about it.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/12/2025”
Oh, here's a article about it:
https://www.mediaite.com/news/trumps-attempted-library-of-congress-takeover-thwarted-as-two-of-his-appointees-were-escorted-off-the-premises-cbs-news/
"
There is currently an internet rumor that DOGE is trying to get into the Library of Congress (Which is run by the legislative branch, not executive) and the Capitol Police (Also run by the legislative) is stopping them.
This is after Trump fired the head of the Library of Congress, which he apparently has the power to do, and supposedly appointed an acting director, which I am not clear he can do.
it is unclear what is actually happening at this point, but we'll see if Congress allows the executive to run roughshod over something _they_ own.
On “From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”
Do you see the word 'discriminatory' in there? Or how this was done by the EEOC?
Target set up assessments that the government alleged 'disproportionately screened out black, Asian, and female applicant'. And under Griggs v. Duke Power Co, the government doesn't have to prove discriminatory _intent_ if those assessments were 'not sufficiently job-related and consistent with business necessity', which the government also alleged.
This is...literally, word for word, what I just explained the standards were under Griggs, and I even added a caveat that while Griggs said 'functionally exclude', I kinda doubt the courts would currently be happy with something that stopped only 40% of Black applicants and 10% of whites, or whatever. You know, the exact situation that Target found themselves in.
In case people are not following:
You can give all the irrational tests you want, involving Legos or writing essays or whatever, _as long as_ they do not have discriminatory outcomes. If they do end up having a discriminatory outcome, it doesn't matter what your intent was. (Or, more relevantly to the law, the government doesn't have to _prove_ your intent.)
On “United States and China Agree to 90 Day Tariff Reprieve”
Lost in all this is this bit of stupidity: over what the president said was China’s failure to stop fentanyl-related chemicals from reaching the United States
Do you want to know how that actually works? Because it is astonishingly stupid. Here's the DEA explaining it: https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States_0.pdf
So, there a dozen different precursor chemicals for fentanyl, including a lot with legitimate medical uses.
China makes those chemicals, and ships them either to Mexican labs, or hilariously, to the US, where they then smuggled out to Mexican labs. (Yes, they are mailing drug precursors into the US, and then having to smuggle them _out_.) They are then turned into fentanyl, and smuggled back into the US, almost entirely though legitimate ports of entry with specially built vehicles using professional couriers , the majority of which are probably US citizens at this point.
You'll notice that China is barely involved in this, and moreover, their role is completely replaceable. In fact, India has already started to replace it. And by 'already started', I mean the DEA link there is explaining how they had started back in 2018. In fact, they may have already moved somewhere else besides India.
Fentanyl is sorta the ultimate logical conclusion of the drug war: A substance so potent that it has incredible bang for the buck (And thus incredibly easy to accidentally overdose on) and is made from precursors that even smaller. This is, literally, an unwinnable fight.
The best we can possible do is stop the _Mexican_ labs from turning the precursors into the real thing, which would be incredibly hard. That would require wrestling control of parts of Mexico away from the drug cartels (Which neither us or the Mexican government has been able to do for decades) or locking the border down almost completely to _legitimate_ travel. At which point the drug network would just switch to the illegal side and start using that. (Which it doesn't do now because people trying to sneak into the US for jobs and disappearing into 'somewhere in the US where they can get a job' are rather less trustworthy than American citizens in San Diego that makes a trip every Sunday and takes a standard cut and they can show up at the house of and break their legs if the drugs go missing.) So we have to lock _that_ down, also. We're like three impossible things deep at this point.
And that will just mean we start running the labs here. Which, as all the meth labs demonstrate, we are certainly willing to do. And we will do very poorly, making even more erratic quality, killing even more people.
There really is not, in any manner, a solution here. Drugs have won the drug war.
The thing we need to start thinking about is the thing we _should_ have been thinking about decades ago: Reducing the circumstances, both economic and social, where people turn to hard drugs, providing a place for them to be safe, providing _softer_ drugs so they don't go 'all the way', and providing a way back.
Because what we cannot do is magically stop them from having access if they want them.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/5/2025”
The Palestinian leadership has not gone on any quest to destroy Israel, and has in fact been unable to get Israel to even _stop stealing West Bank land_ for the past two decades, which is an obvious prerequisite to even discussing any sort of agreement.
On “From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”
I understand that is what people quote from it, and seem to think it says, but that sentence is completely out of context. The context is that it is the second of two sentences:
Even if there is no discriminatory intent, an employer may not use a job requirement that functionally excludes members of a certain race if it has no relation to measuring performance of job duties. Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job.
For more context, Griggs v. Duke Power Co is a holding about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Which only cares about discrimination. If the first sentence is not true, if there is no discriminatory outcome, the second sentence is completely irrelevant. Employers can require prospective employees do literally anything (Not barred elsewhere by law) as long as the outcome doesn't 'functionally excludes members of a certain race'.
And notice how strong that qualifier is. It's not even 'impacts more the members of a certain race'. It has to functionally exclude members of a certain race. Or, presumably, functionally exclude other categories protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
This ruling is pretty much entirely about intent. It says 'You cannot set up unrelated tests that unintentionally discriminate. The fact it is unintentional does not matter.'. It is not intended to, surreally, bar all irrelevant employment tests from existing...the court cannot magically make a law about that! What would that even be illegal under?
(I do suspect they'd have a problem with mere disparate impact now, but Griggs v. Duke Power Co doesn't say it.)
"
I don't think that Griggs v. Duke Power Co says what you think it says.
Or, alternately, you think racial minorities are somehow more likely to be bad at legos, which...seems unlikely for anyone to think.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 5/5/2025”
This means that the final settlement would be Israel vanquishing the Palestinians, which would be morally horrible, Israel unilaterally deciding the borders of a Palestinian state, or a negotiated deal.
Israel not only isn't offering the last option, they're not even offering the second.
On “The Department of Good Things”
I have no idea what point you think you are making.
TSA repeatedly fails _accidental_ penetration testing, in that they allow people to fly with prohibited things all the time. By accident, not hidden.
They also notable do not punish people for attempting to fly with prohibited things, which is...very stupid if the goal is to stop getting prohibited things on planes. The TSA also does not bother to keep track of how many times people 'accidentally' tried to take box cutters through.
Put that together with their absysmal track record of actually detecting things, and literally any idiot with a few thousand dollars can get a box cutter on a plane...all they have to do is _keep trying_ via cheap flights. Oh, let me just constantly book a bunch for cheap-last minute flights and I'll try to walk a box cutter on 'by accident' each time, and I'll manage it, statistically, by flight 10 or so. (If someone needs it on a specific flight, they just have to do this in advance and find a hiding place at the airport where they can keep it until then.)
And you may notice that 'Just use multiple flights and hide stuff' is, uh, pretty obvious a way to get large amounts of liquids through, although that restriction is so inherently stupid no one even pretends it matters.
This discussion topic is about parts of the government that are failures, and the TSA is, as set up, is about as objectively a failure as it is possible for a government agency to be...they have literally one job, a job stopping a thing from happening, and any idiot who wishes to make that happen _could trivially do so_.
It's just, no one really wants to.
(This is on top of the fact it's probably impossible to stop razor blades but allow electronic devices, since people could just, ya know, hide them pretty easily in electronic devices. But no one has to!)
As for knives and poky-tools, maybe the reason they don’t care as much about those is just what was pointed out earlier–that locking the cockpit door leaves you completely protected from such items, at least for the time it would take to call in an emergency.
Pointing out that what the TSA is trying to do is utterly pointless is a very strange way to defend the fact they are a complete failure at doing what they are trying to do.
Like, sure, the entire premise of their existence is moronic to start with, which is good, because they are not actually fulfilling it.
"
I don't remember that at all.
That's a pretty stupid objection. Yes, that is part of the president's job, but the president only functions because he has literally dozens of advisors doing a first-pass over things to bring certain things to his attention and let him ignore other things.
Having someone whose job is 'weird interactions and redundancies in policy' seems entirely reasonable. Honestly, I feel like that should actually be a white house office, where every department has representatives in it who can say to other department's representatives 'Hey, have you noticed that our two Departments have nearly identical definitions of X, and it probably would make sense to make them _actually_ word-for-word identical?' and things like that.
You think the _president_ should be handed a bunch of information about individual threats from the FBI and CIA and somehow integrate that? And coordinate the two? What?
The National Security Advisor and National Security Council are intended to talk to the _president_, they are not any sort of inter-agency communications.
"
I didn't say they managed them, I said they had _information_ about them.
FEMA does not.
"
If I were drafted to run for president, my first policy position would — and this sounds odd, but I’m looking for votes — eliminate TSA and we’d go back to meeting Grandma at her gate when her plane arrived.
I always thought my proposal would be funnier and stop anyone from trying to implement that sort of moronic thing again, because the TSA is _so_ bad at their job:
Me, as president: *holds up a bright orange piece of metal* "This is a pentest box cutter. It is the same size and shape as box cutters, but cannot be used as a weapon. You can buy them from the government for $100. We also have a gun-shape piece of metal for $500, and just a razor-blade-shape for $20. They are for you to attempt to smuggle them onto planes. If you get caught, it will be confiscated and you will be out the purchase price. If you hand one of these to a flight attendant while in the air, you will get a voucher for the price of what you smuggled in x10, written out of the budget of the TSA. You cannot be punished by the TSA for this."
Sounds reasonable for a penetration test until you remember a) how hilariously bad the TSA is at their job, and b) how impossible and stupid their entire job is to start with. They'd start bleeding red. I just wish I could come up with some plausible method of judging liquid smuggling.
"
Well, the Department of Education has facts about every child educated in that area and every teacher, it knows what schools exist where, it knows how schools have to function and what is needed to make a school, etc, etc.
On top of that, when it doesn't know something factual, it's the authority to figure it out. For example, how much school can students miss, what special things need to be done when students are trying to cope with the possible loss of their home and being shoved into a new environment, etc.
If you want all that in FEMA, you're basically building a smaller Department of Education inside of FEMA that does _nothing at all_ and just sits there idle a good chuck of time.
Or you can have a dedicated department full of people who are experts in education who can put any long-term work aside in an emergency and deal with that, and then go back to doing other things.
"
It's worth reminding people that Departments are actually ways to _organize_ government programs, and we might be better off thinking of them like that, instead of 'a thing'.
Like, the Department of Education has emergency funds to allocate to education in disaster areas, for doing things like renting buildings and flying in teachers if schools are destroyed, along with longer-term grants to actually fix schools as part of national disasters. It's called the Disaster Recovery Unit, it actually was just formed in 2018, but that's because it was sorta distributed across the entire Department of Education before that.
Presumably, if we think we should care the Federal government responding to national disasters, someone probably needs to be thinking about education in all that. And if we are going to have anything else in the government doing education, it should probably be those people we ask. And having a Department for something like that seems to make sense.
But even if you think we shouldn't have a Department for Education, we still need to, uh, do that.
Another thing the Department of Education does: Education for Native American Tribes. Not only do they not have the tax base to do it themselves, we often have an obligation to fund education for them _under treaty_. (Let's try not to break even more treaties with them, shall we?)
Other departments make less sense and have weirder grouping. But even the ones that do not make sense and seem completely arbitrary, that doesn't mean anything.
Because that is thinking at the wrong level, it's like looking at a giant office building and decided to abolish the office building instead of offices or jobs. A Department is just a big collection of things we put next to each other. If we have too many things, or they aren't working well, the thing to do is to look at those things.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/28/2025”
Yeah, they had to withdraw last year, also.
There are legitimate debates in the LGBTQ community about how much to allow different groups to be represented at Pride. This is often pretty...acrimonious. For example, I see Israeli flags in that picture saying 'Bring them home', (Which is apparently from that previous year.) That...I can see Pride having a problem with. Maybe. I don't know if they would, but I can imagine a world in which they do. Likewise, I can imagine a world where there's restrictions on Palestinian LGBTQ groups and what they can say in the Parade.
But that isn't what happened here. What happened here, apparently, is that KeshetUK was allowed in (As it should be in general, as what it said about the conflict seems completely reasonable.), and then random protestors deciding to attack Pride over that, to the point that groups has to leave for safety concerns.
I wish we knew how reasonable KeshetUK's requests were. Both sides have said they were not able to reach an agreement. What exactly was the sticking point?
But I will say: If you ever find yourself in a group organizing action against a Pride parade, to the point people feel unsafe, you're probably the baddies.
On “Gender Critical: Legally Defining Sex”
I’d think that’s exactly what we’d be concerned about.
Hey, what other group should we treat by statistics in prison? Just sex?
You are assuming trans-women prisoners behave like women and not men. In order to make that assumption you handwaved my various links as “misleading statistics” and didn’t supply any of your own (to be fair I can’t find any either).
Prisons are incredibly bad at keeping any statistics about violence they are not required by law to do. They are bad at literally every aspect of 'letting anyone know what is happening there'.
That doesn’t answer the issue on whether they behave more like men or like women as far as aggression is concerned.
Behave like women? In prison? Aka... more likely to rape someone in prison? https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/svpjri0809.pdf
Scroll down to page 12. The amount of rape from other inmates in men's prisons is 1.9%. The amount of rape from other inmate's in women's prisons is 4.7%. This report is from 2008, so trans people are not relevant to this.
Of course, that isn't because women are more aggressive than men, it's because of the opposite, Because women in prison are statistically a little different than men in a particular way. Specifically, women are way more like to be drug users, and abuse victims, and people basically victimized into crime. They often are sex workers, coerced or have no choice. (1)
In other words, women in prisons are more likely than men to be victims, and I don't mean they shouldn't be there, although that is often true. It is that 'being victimized' is sort of their role in life. And this obviously a spectrum, I'm not saying this is true of every woman, or no men, I'm saying, statistically, more women end in prison that way, or more likely to have 'abuse victim' as one of their traits.
And thus they are easier to be sexually victimized by more aggressive people.
And at this point, I hope a little voice in your head has gone 'Oh no', because you just said ' trans people are horrifically abused in general'. Yes, it's exactly what you think. This specific report doesn't have any statistics on trans people, but scroll down to page 13. People are nine times more likely to be sexually assaulted in prison if they are not straight.
Because, again, marginalized people who _end up in prison_ are often there due to constant victimization. And this includes queer people.
But, there are certainly aggressive trans women, although claiming that's 'behaving like men' is very silly. This is why it is up to the prison to make the determination.
Or maybe the results aren’t what we’d like to see? I see serious results on trans victimization but there’s nothing on the reverse.
It's weird that seems so uncommon, it's almost as if the trans women who would assault women in prison are the people who assaulted women _outside_ of prison and hence are very unlikely to be placed in women's prisons to start with! (Unlike cis female rapists, who go there and have plenty of women with a lifetime of victim mindset to abuse. Oopsie!)
But don't worry, I'm sure there are exactly three counter examples that exist, where the system did something dumb, and those three examples are repeated endlessly and pretending to be how everything works.
1) BTW, everyone will swear up and down that sex work will not land someone in prison, only people who pimp them out, that ignoring just how many tripwire laws there are that count as 'pimping'. It's a felony in maybe three different ways for two prostitutes to live together and share rent, for example.
"
And yet we still have women’s prisons and women’s sports.
We do not have 'women's prisons' or 'women's sports' in any sense the Trump Administration would agree with, so it seems odd to claim such.
We even have those things for good reason.
You really don't want people to start talking about the reason we have women's sports. It will _not_ turn out the way you want.
"
If you want to know what I'm actually arguing for, it's not prisons.
Assuming prisons exist, my next level of argument is: Do not blatantly allow people in prison to commit more crimes while in prison against other people.
Assuming we cannot stop _that_ in general,for some reason, my argument is for what literally already exists: Making decisions about where individual prisoners belong based on those prisoners.
Pssst: There is a giant billionaire backed operation that exists solely to produce misleading statistics in this manner. In actual reality, there are almost no meaningful statistics _at all_ on trans people and criminality. No one collects those.
It is also extremely unclear why we should care about 'statistical rate of sex crimes' when deciding where to send people. Do you know where there is gigantic spike in actual reported rapes? It's when trans women are in men's prisons. If we're going to care about anything, maybe the most obvious point?!
It appears the logic is 'Send the trans women to men's prisons, where there is near certainly they will be raped, instead of women's prisons, where they are not actually likely to rape but could'. (And ignoring all the other rape.)
Women who raped other women are more likely to rape other women in prison, should we send them to men's prison?
What sort of weird logic is all this?
How about we do everything in our power to reduce rape? Including allowing and even requiring the prison system to make decisions to keep people safe by sending people where it determines, individually, would be in reducing threats both from and to them?
You know, how the system worked until Trump.
"
Google's AI cannot agree or disagree with anyone. Google's AI is a computer program that strings plausible-sounding text together in such a way that it is statistically-likely English. But, sure, what part of what I said do randomly sentences that statistically look like real sentences object to?
Because it is very easy to demonstrate that the National Organization of Women supports the ERA, that's literally been a focus of theirs from the very start.
And it's pretty easy to understand that the ERA would no longer allow segregated sports team. There are plenty of conservative sites I could link to that explain this, as opposition. And...they're not lying there.
Of course, NOW will just ignore that. In fact, they very carefully do not say anything on that topic. They do say this, though: https://now.org/era-frequently-asked-questions/
The general objective of the amendment was to end legal distinctions between men and women as related to divorce, property, employment and other matters where government law and policy is involved.
Hmm. Also:
For the first time, sex would be considered suspect classification, as race currently is. Governmental actions that treat males or females differently as a class would be subject to strict judicial scrutiny and would have to meet the highest level of justification – a necessary and compelling state interest – to be upheld as constitutional.
Weird. It's almost as if they know it but aren't saying it.
Supporting a constitutional amendment that would outlaw the operation of women's sports teams (at least any governmental school or college) does, in actuality, seem to be 'against women's sports existing'.
First, again, a lot of feminists argue that suspect that women are not doing as well simply because they are not provided the same support.
But, and I think I need to make this clear, even if these differences turn out to be inherent instead of support and training: Feminists (Or, at least, NOW, which is hardly some extremist organization) does not want laws to exist that treat men and women differently. Period. End of story.
They do not want laws that do that both as a matter of principle, and they don't want them because having such laws is unsafe for women! Those laws create a precedent that can be used against women. Usually under the justification of 'protecting women'.
And hey, it is! It's literally what's happening here, according to NOW. Not only against trans women, but the policing of all women in sports. Invasive checks and questions and accusations and racism. All because of segregated sports.
What are you talking about? Why do we care about them?
"
You know, I deliberately tried to make this discussion not about trans people. Literally did not mention them, just pointed out how regulations trying to define what legal sex someone is can't really work. That sex actually is a spectrum, and it would be a spectrum even trans people did not exist, and there is no magical dividing line, something which has been pointed out for decades, but the Gender Critical movement always handwaves with 'That is a very small subset.'.
As I pointed out, I am fairly certain very small subsets of people need to know what bathroom they can use, or what sports they can play. They have to be sent to a specific prison. We do need to be able to sex literally every human that exists if we have laws based on sex.
Absolutely no one in this discussion has talked about that. And instead talked about trans people. A group of people I literally didn't mention.
People, just a basic observation here: You cannot even start to make the argument about where what prisons someone belong in or what sport teams people should be able to play on, based on sex, until you can demonstrate there is a functional legal method to decide sex. (Besides the current use of 'Just going with whatever arbitrary thing is written on their documentation'.)
If you cannot demonstrate that, it doesn't matter what rules you think different sexes should follow.
(This is, incidentally, why we generally do not base rights around people's biology. In fact, the one other place we base rights on biology is people's age, and that also is just 'whatever is written on their documentation'.)
On “A Backlash Is Coming”
Immigration is a place where the right, and Trump especially, holds extremist positions but manage to debate much more rational and sane positions as wedge issues. Often these rational and sane positions are _already the actual law_, or extremely close to them, but the negative-information voters have been misinformed about this.
For example, a lot of polls said that Biden should do more about illegal immigrants who committed serious crimes, with a perception that he had somehow done less than Trump. This is incredibly wrong as an understanding of the universe, and these polls then get presented as indicating that immigration should be harsher, and Republicans are doing better.
That is already how we did it! Biden actually upped deportation! We deported people who committed serious crimes. And we had voters go 'Well, of course people who are living here peacefully should be allowed to live here, even someday become citizens, but the government needs to start arresting illegal immigrants who commit serious crime! Better vote for Trump!'
This is not the only thing. Does anyone want to guess the prior rules about trans prisoners? The prior rules are 'They should be where the most people are safest, upon individual determination by the prison system'! We already didn't have a system where people could just 'claim to be' something, and then be legally required to be transferred!
We had it with abortion, where the right runs around for decades yammering about elective third-trimester abortions and how doctors are pulling living babies out and killing them, and how that should be illegal.
Over and over and over again, the right lies about stuff, pretending what is going on currently is insane, and proposes _what is already happening_, and voters got 'Holy crap, yeah, we need to stop the far left current government from doing made up thing and instead do the reasonable thing you all want!'
We are far, FAR past zero information voters, and so far into negative information, with no pushback or correction by the media that just happily both-sided us into this, that we eventually got Trump, and have essentially destroyed a good chunk of how this country work. A huge amount of the current electorate is operating in complete nonsense land, lead there by what is essentially Republican propaganda. I know there's going to be arguments here to me saying it, but it's true.
Well, a lot of Trump voters are now saying 'Wait, they changed the law to requiring beating puppies to death with shovels? They promised the reasonable compromise of letting puppies live but people could voluntarily get dogs spayed and neutered so less people would drown under puppy floods!' and everyone turns and looks at them and says 'That already was how it worked, you utter dumbass...also puppy floods are not a thing and don't kill people. That has never happened. Also also, Trump did not promise that reasonable compromise. He promised to beat puppies to death with shovels. He literally said it, on Truth Social, here's the image.' and they respond 'No! I mean, yeah, he said it, but everyone said he wasn't serious!'
On “Gender Critical: Legally Defining Sex”
Sure, have some entire books:
https://academic.oup.com/book/53445
https://www.amazon.com/Frailty-Myth-Approaching-Physical-Equality/dp/0375502351
A magazine article:
https://www.howwegettonext.com/is-gender-segregation-in-sports-necessary/
One from a legal direction:
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol95/iss5/13/
However, I feel you have misunderstood my response.
I claim is that feminists _did not want separate sports_. Feminists are not the reason those exist, they were never lobbied for by feminists, they often were enacted in direct opposition to what feminists were trying to do. They were seen as a compromise, one that feminists mostly went along with. (It was way, way, WAY more important to have, for example, bank accounts and laws against spousal rape.)
These sports are, at this point, pretty entrenched as a compromise, so generally feminists just work with that compromise existing. Spending time and effort trying to change them is pointless.
To be clear here, there is a difference between 'We are going to work within the law as it is, and if we urge changes, they are minor changes', which is what mainstream women's right groups do, and 'Feminist theory'.
If we're going to start listening to women's right groups like the National Organization of Women, we should probably just, more directly, listen to what they say about laws barring trans athletes from women's sports. https://now.org/blog/even-if-bigots-insist-it-is-waging-a-hate-campaign-against-trans-people-is-not-feminist/
Although, NOW is pushing for passage (and was always one of the main backers) of the ERA, and one of the right-wing attacks _on_ the ERA, back in the 70s, is that it would not allow separate 'women spaces', exactly like women's sports, and as a more deciding issue back then, women's restrooms. (Although then, as is now, it was pointed out we don't actually have laws about who can use what restrooms!)
No one has really come up with a reason why that interpretation would be incorrect, how such segregated categories could hypothetically be legal under the ERA. The ERA basically forbids the US government (and, by incorporation, state governments), from taking sex into consideration _at all_, and the government (including, for example, a local high school) would be exactly as unable to make a rule saying 'Women cannot play on the men's team, or vis versa' as they could make a rule saying 'Blacks cannot play on the white's team, or vis versa'.
So NOW is, in fact, lobbying for dissolving women's sports, and always done so. They just aren't _saying_ that. Because they rightly realized what a (moronic) hotbutton issue it was to have sex integrated teams, and NOW is doing respectability politics. (And the far-right decided to make it hot button issue about trans people anyway, and NOW, to their credit, pointed out idiotic that is.)
"
It's almost the inverse, actually.
Or, to rephrase: A lot of this comes down to whether or not one believes that we can reach women's equality by concluding that we cannot actually solve any problems at all. To the extent of being unwilling to stop rape inside _entirely controlled-and-monitored facilities_, so we just have to throw up our hands and make sure that _one_ group doesn't rape women. (Guards raping women, a much larger problem, totally fine. Likewise, other women, totally fine.)
That is the totality of effort: In this one specific case, we are willing to physically stop this very particular sort of rape of some women by a certain specific group.
GO FEMINISM! *raises hands in victory sign* WOO!
Or, new idea: We should not have rape essentially running wild in prison. We should not have male prisoners raping other male prisoners , we should not have male prisoners raping female prisoners, we should not have male guards raping male or female prisoners, we should not have male prisoners raping trans female prisoners, we should not have female prisoners raping other female prisoners, we should not, in fact, have any of that happening at all.
Which is a thing we could trivially do.
Instead, we have built a system where it is happening openly and _encouraged_ by prison staff.
Hey, InMD, I said it to Dark, but did you happen to google v-coding? Do you know what that is? It's when prison guards reward a well-behaving prisoner, or just one that bribes them well, with a trans woman cellmate to rape.