Gender Roles

[Loren Pechtel]

It's also questionable whether women actually commit crimes at lower rates.

There is no question at all that women commit violent and sexual crimes at significantly lower rates.

Goalpost shift detected. Also not actually necessarily true.

As it is I just sat down for dinner with a friend of mine who spent years in a physically abusive relationship, who was abused heavily by his wife. She never once had the cops called on her, but we all saw the fresh bruises.

My experience says this claim that men abuse more is straight up false, and recent studies digging past the reporting gap indicate that partner abuse happens at commensurate rates.

Apples and Oranges!!

Overall, men commit far more violence and sexual crime than women. Domestic violence is different, it's roughly (we do not have good data) equal in frequency but on average more severe when committed by men. (Which is to be expected considering the force disparity.)

Of course, the brazenness of women who abuse is off the charts because they know they won't be called out for it, even if they are doing it in public with witnesses, and at least "physical" violence leaves scars that heal. Social violence on the other hand leaves wounds that remain for a lifetime (often in the form of a DARVO that labels the victim as an abuser).

Yeah, when it's just social violence my impression is the disparity goes away. It's just men are more likely to get physical.

 

[Jarhyn]

It's also questionable whether women actually commit crimes at lower rates.

There is no question at all that women commit violent and sexual crimes at significantly lower rates.

Goalpost shift detected. Also not actually necessarily true.

As it is I just sat down for dinner with a friend of mine who spent years in a physically abusive relationship, who was abused heavily by his wife. She never once had the cops called on her, but we all saw the fresh bruises.

My experience says this claim that men abuse more is straight up false, and recent studies digging past the reporting gap indicate that partner abuse happens at commensurate rates.

Apples and Oranges!!

Overall, men commit far more violence and sexual crime than women. Domestic violence is different, it's roughly (we do not have good data) equal in frequency but on average more severe when committed by men. (Which is to be expected considering the force disparity.)

Of course, the brazenness of women who abuse is off the charts because they know they won't be called out for it, even if they are doing it in public with witnesses, and at least "physical" violence leaves scars that heal. Social violence on the other hand leaves wounds that remain for a lifetime (often in the form of a DARVO that labels the victim as an abuser).

Yeah, when it's just social violence my impression is the disparity goes away. It's just men are more likely to get physical.

My point is that both forms of violence have different, but often equally severe consequences.

I've known some men who have been the victim of some pretty severe social violence in addition to physical violence that is as excessive and serious as what is often directed at women.

The friend I met with this week had been pushed down stairs as a larger man a few times, and broken bones from it. He could have easily been killed in those events.

Moreover, on the social side of things, I've been witness to social violence involving abuse DARVO, including a pointed situation wherein a crazy woman tried to invoke others to attack me, while telling me if I retaliated in any way the cops would send me to prison for attacking her.

This has had FAR more traumatic impact on me than even events where I was forced to threaten someone with violence in response to an evolving situation.

 

[Emily Lake]

What is "social violence"?

 

[Emily Lake]

This has had FAR more traumatic impact on me than even events where I was forced to threaten someone with violence in response to an evolving situation.

This has to be poor wording, so I'd ask you to elaborate or rephrase.

Right now, this reads as if you're saying that other people threatening you has more impact on you than you threatening other people has impact on you. Which is a bit of a "no shit" statement as well as begging the question of whether or not you are considering the impact that your threats had on other people.

 

[Jarhyn]

This has had FAR more traumatic impact on me than even events where I was forced to threaten someone with violence in response to an evolving situation.

This has to be poor wording, so I'd ask you to elaborate or rephrase.

Right now, this reads as if you're saying that other people threatening you has more impact on you than you threatening other people has impact on you. Which is a bit of a "no shit" statement as well as begging the question of whether or not you are considering the impact that your threats had on other people.

You don't get to hear about it. I told someone here about it. Maybe two? I think @ZiprHead might be one of them. I cry about it every once in a while. It's less traumatic in some ways only because I would have lost my one favorite thing from that encounter had things gone any further, on account of physical violence. In the other encounters, the ones in which social violence was involved, I would have lost everything, and in the worst of them, also my favorite thing. For an autistic person who is attached to certain things, this is extremely traumatic.

I can barely be out of the house without some set of things that are mine.

You seem to use trauma as some kind of shield against criticism, but the fact is, trauma just sucks. I've said why to the people that matter I've talked about the physical violence, and you aren't them.

Social violence is any kind of violence that is directed at who someone is, such that it will impact jobs, opinions, and perceptions of them untruthfully. My experience of it was someone screaming that she would claim I had attacked her despite her clearly being in the process of attacking me, after which she followed me to a bus stop and then proceeded to tell people there that I had attacked her, proceeded to record me as I just stood there, and I ended up calling the cops just so I could talk to someone who would, hopefully, have to file a report.

I could far more easily deal with the consequences of someone straight up punching me in the back of the head than if anything she had said or had done had led to any sort of socially driven escalation.

I had a housemate for a while for which a side effect of something to do with their HRT was causing spontaneous outbreaks of social violence in the form of rape accusations against others and even once against me. The most ironic part is that they sexually harassed me as well.

A fight would have gotten me a black eye, a sore body. That rape accusation? The possibility of getting attacked by some set of enraged persons? If the first had made headway (it didn't), I would have lost my job, friends, house, never would have met my spouse, all for taking her in after she claimed someone else had raped her and needed a place to live, and in the second, I could have died, with physical violence paid after social.

 

[Bomb#20]

Also, @Bomb#20 we have had this conversation. It's they/them, to you.

Can you clarify what it is about my (vanished) post that you object to? Do you feel this should be an English-only forum, or is Estonian the only language you want censored, or do you have a list of acceptable and unacceptable languages for us all to consult before we code-switch to them? Or is your problem with the meaning of the words I used? Do you feel aggrieved that the Estonian pronouns' semantics imply you are a sentient being rather than an inanimate object? "They" and "them", being the standard plural forms of "it", don't imply that. Or was it their implication that you are one single person rather than a collection of people that offended you? Or by using "they" and "them" do you wish people to communicate that you are a person whose gender they are not specifying, which is precisely what the Estonian words mean? And do you bear no ill-will toward the Estonian language? Was what you actually object to about the pronouns I used my insubordination?

If a Jewish person had objected to my use of the phrase "Jewish person" and told me "it's The Chosen People, to you.", that would not have made it The Chosen People to me. Whether I give lip-service to other people's religions is not up to them to choose for me. You are not my commanding officer, and I am not your dhimmi.

 

[Bomb#20]

I give you the history of (gang) crime in NYC and New England. Less than a century ago, the scene was dominated by Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendents, with a significant Jewish component, two groups that were being given a hard time by old-time New Yorkers. Half a century later, the O'Connors and Rosensteins of NYC were for the most part accepted as old-time New Yorkers themselves and behaved the part, with Puerto Ricans and African American immigrants from Dixieland and the Caribbeans taking over their former role.

Are you suggesting you can prove a generalization with an example?!? That's not how it works. I already disproved the generalization with a counterexample.

I didn't say it's the only significant factor. I said it is a factor that must not be lightly discarded when comparing two groups one of which is obviously marginalised.

Why must it not? I discard that factor as lightly as you'd discard the inference that elephants' tusks are made of keratin based on the factor that we have an example of a hard protrusion made of keratin on another kind of pachyderm. Define "marginalised". Show that the people "marginalising" Irish Catholics and Jews were doing the same thing to them as those "marginalising" transgendered people. Show that turning to crime is a direct reaction to being "marginalised", and is neither caused by some second factor that happened to the Irish Catholics and Jews in parallel with being "marginalised", nor mediated by some third factor such as clannishness.

If you believe that development has anything other than a sociological explanation, ie that "criminal genes" were bred out of the Irish and Jewish gene pools within a mere couple of generations, I want to see your math to show that's even remotely plausible!

There are no differences between any two groups of people, except how others treat them, and their DNA? Our lineage abandoned that whole ill-conceived abortive flirtation with "culture" when we split off from the other great apes?

 

[Jokodo]

I'd rather not continue this particular line if discussion. There's probably 5-10 threads where it better fits over in Political Discussions, and there's a reason I'm largely starting out of PD. My desire for political forth and back in this venue is amply satisfied with mutual accusations of ideological bias clouding each other's analyses in science topics.

I will however say this much: you truly underestimate the power of doors!

I'm probably Europeansplaining as much as mansplaining here, but granted, I need to tread lightly here. I'm not saying doors remove all points of contention, but that they will take out much of the heat from that particular argument, and I fail to understand why anyone would think not having them is a good idea.

Hey, I like doors too; but as I said, I know women who find them an inadequate substitute for actual ladies' rooms even if they help a bit. As far as Europeansplaining goes, I wonder. I'm aware the trend of converting public restrooms from sexed to "gender neutral" has gone a lot further in several European countries than it has in the U.S.,

I don't know if that's true. My impression is rather that gender/sex segregated restrooms were never as universal in the first place. Office buildings may be another story due to workplace regulations, but it seems that in many countries, for many types of venues, separate restrooms are/were more a question of choosing to accommodate costumer expectations than a legal requirement. Hostels or cheap hotels without individual toilets often have/ had just one set per floor, sport clubs or some (smaller) restaurants also may only have one set. I've never heard anyone complain about this as being anything more than - at most - slightly awkward. Doors magic, I guess!

but just how much input did the European mostly male policy makers who brought about that trend take from European women before deciding on that "solution"?

What policy makers? Aren't you all for individual businesses deciding for themselves, within the law, how to best accommodate their customers?

Every time I hear European men claim it doesn't bother their women to have to use the (let's be frank) men's room, I can't help but be reminded of the third-world tribal elders who claim authority to speak for their cultures when they argue Westerners barging in promoting female equality are racist imperialists.

See above - I've never heard a feminist critique of non-segregated restrooms in those places were they always existed, why would it become a feminist issue when a few more places decide to have them?

And it's not clear to me why you or I or any man should get a vote on what qualifies as a "solution" to the problem that the existence of private spaces for women is incompatible with progressives' universal approach to "solving" conflicts of interest between different people: categorizing those people into groups and then checking to see which group outranks which on the progressive stack.

I don't know about "progressives", I'm just one guy from Austria. Can you try to stick to arguments this one guy has made?

I do. I didn't say that was your approach; I said that was the problem you're proposing "the solution" to.

The bathroom problem currently plaguing America was entirely created by our progressives putting their own self-congratulation-as-social-policy priorities ahead of what the majority of the American people want. Back when the men using women's rooms were pre-op transsexuals fulfilling their "live as a woman for a year" requirement to get a psychiatrist to approve them for sex-change operations, conflicts were so rare that normal courtesy was enough to manage them. It was the collective decision within the progressive subculture to reformulate admission of men to ladies' rooms from a privilege granted by women to pre-ops into a right granted by progressives to every non-op man who self-IDs as gender dysphoric, with the inevitable consequence that cis-male predators were also granted that right, that caused conflicts to become so common the authorities got called on to intervene. You say "the solution" is doors. I'd say "the solution" is for the progressives to crawl back under their rock; but since that's an even more unrealistic fantasy than expecting women to be satisfied by a slightly taller temporary visual blockage between themselves and the cis-male predators waiting for them at the sink,

I don't know why "at the sink" would be a more convenient place for predators to wait than the staircase or the parkinh lot, or the office itself during after hours when only a few people doing overtime that particular day remain. And if that isn't enough to put you at rest, doors magic kicks in again: doors make it so that installing cctv at the sink is no more an invasion of privacy than it is at any other place where we already agreed to suffer it.

my back-up solution is for the rest of us to grow a spine and stand up to the progressives' bullying.

So you're proposing to go back to an idealised past 'when the men using women's rooms were pre-op transsexuals fulfilling their "live as a woman for a year" requirement', and insinuating that my preferred solution involves "every non-op man who self-IDs as gender dysphoric" going to the ladies' room? I don't know where you're getting that from. We wouldn't be having this argument if all that Emily or others in that camp demanded was that people with gender dysphoria only known to those they share it with, who would be inconspicuous as cis-males, better use the men's - that's exactly my position! I think I specifically said that, to the extent this needs to be regulated at all, the relevant bisection should be "go wherever you'll cause the least fuss". I was talking about people using HRT or (not fully passing) post-ops individuals or people with partial androgen insensitivity. People who wouldn't easily pass for cis-women when you look closely but who'd arguably stand out more in a group of typical cis-males. Saying "the women's is for women only, and women are people with a uterus and a vagina" which seems to be Emily's position, would have them sent to the men's, and saying that's not an optimal solution implies nothing about where merely self-ID'd transwomen should go. It also raises the problem of people like @Loren Pechtel 's SIL - in practice, saying trans women should categorically stay clear of the women's implies that a cis woman of unusually masculine appearance can be asked to show her genitals at the sink to anyone suspecting she's trans - and I don't want to live in a world where that's the case!

I will say, however, that what you're saying did apply to Emily, mutatis mutandi as the Romans say: if allowing people who are not unambiguously women into the ladies' causes discomfort or reduces the feeling of safety of some cis women, send those weirdos to the gents' and everyone else and their needs can ....

False dilemma fallacy. You talk as though "people who are not unambiguously women" are interchangeable parts and we have no option for dealing with their needs other than one-size-fits-all.

I don't know where you're getting that from. Can you elaborate?

We men are perfectly capable of letting women tell us which classes of "people who are not unambiguously women" they want to let into the ladies' rooms and which they want to send to the gents'. But taking instructions from women seems to be an affront to our masculinity.

Emily isn't "women". Emily is Emily. There sure are other women you think like Emily, but neither of us knows how numerous they are and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

A a matter of fact, trans women and non-binary people cause as much discomfort in the gents', and as I'm sure Emily will agree, toxic masculinity is a thing. Men who react to that kind of discomfort with violence are not rare. Ffs, men in Western countries were frequently assaulted out of the blue simply for having long hair within the lifetime if all major 2024 US president candidates. Things have gotten better since then, but if you think they have gotten to where the gents' is a safe place for trans women, I've got some prime property at a real bargain northeast of downtown Chicago you might be interested in (visitations start in December).

Oh for the love of god! Non-binary people aren't safe from men in the men's room and we're supposed to believe that letting them use the women's gender-neutral room is going to make them safe, why? Because the gender-neutral room used to be a women's room? The room formerly known as women's will remain safe because the toxic masculine people made uncomfortable by non-binary people will no longer react with violence because the toxic masculine people now allowed into that room will experience a change of perspective once they're in a restroom that doesn't say "Gents" on the door?

Are we talking about giving up sex/ gender segregated restrooms, or are we talking about letting (some) trans women into the ladies'? If it's the latter, the answer is easy: Toxic masculine people won't react with violence to the presence of non-binary people in the "ladies' and sissies'" (as they'd likely call it in their head) because they won't be there - going there would make them a sissy! Toxic masculine people will go to the gents' as long as there is a gents'. Toxic masculine people in general think of themselves as upright citizens standing their ground against an assault on their identity (like the rest of us), not as predators going out of their way to seek out weaker members of society to victimise. If we force non-binary people with male v reproductive anatomy to go to the gents, we put them under their nose right in a place where they expect their masculinity to be confirmed and reinforced.

Yes, I know, this isn't just about discomfort but also about the fear of would-be predators using their professed gender to enter female spaces. But let's be honest, if you think a that kind of person would be prevented by a door sign, or by a law clarifying what that door sign means, let's talk about that property again.

If Emily won't buy that snake-oil from Loren, why would I buy it from you? Would-be predators try to be inconspicuous. A door sign that's respected by nearly everyone is a door sign that makes non-compliers conspicuous.

@Bomb#20 : wanted to add, ran into timeout, put it where you think it fits best. May also be relevant for @Emily Lake :

Whether the do-least-harm solution is sending trans women and people with partial androgen insensitivity to the ladies, or to the gents, or letting them pick based on their individual experience of where they are most welcome, or forcing them into a life or seclusion by barring them from both its an empirical question. Whether we care about them enough to implement measures that will make their life (much) better even if they make other people's life a little worse is a political question. The answer tu neither is fully determined by our understanding of the biology of sex - which I personally find is great because it allows us to discuss the matter as a apolitical one even if we disagree about the peripherally related political questions.

"Make other people's lives a little worse". Belittling the harm to the people you propose to throw under the bus is rarely a sign that you're achieving the do-least-harm solution. Girls are skipping school, or dehydrating themselves, to avoid having to use the boys' rooms now labeled "gender neutral", but it's boys visually indistinguishable from typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with, who are "forced into a life of seclusion".

If you remember any place I talked about "typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with", I'd appreciate a link or quote.

I also wonder whether you have any reason to believe that "girls skipping school, or dehydrating themselves" to avoid sharing a restroom with 3 individuals out of 1000 pupils who self-ID as girls though you wouldn't guess is a thing that exists in the presence of doors anywhere in the world.

 

[Jokodo]

Also, I don't know about the US (as usual), nor am I claiming my experience is representative of Europe or even Austria (as usual), but in my personal experience, fathers in search of a diaper changing table, or fathers accompanying a daughter old enough to go to the toilet herself but too young to clean up independently who don't want to expose her to the kind of toxic masculine conversations she might overhear at the gents', typically make up a larger share of "men using women's rooms" than pre-, post- and non-op trans women combined.

Maybe in the US, every venue that has a diaper changing table at the women's is required to also have one at the men's and men don't talk dirty at the toilet. Maybe. I'd be surprised to learn that's true, though.

 

[Jokodo]

I give you the history of (gang) crime in NYC and New England. Less than a century ago, the scene was dominated by Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendents, with a significant Jewish component, two groups that were being given a hard time by old-time New Yorkers. Half a century later, the O'Connors and Rosensteins of NYC were for the most part accepted as old-time New Yorkers themselves and behaved the part, with Puerto Ricans and African American immigrants from Dixieland and the Caribbeans taking over their former role.

Are you suggesting you can prove a generalization with an example?!? That's not how it works. I already disproved the generalization with a counterexample.

I didn't say it's the only significant factor. I said it is a factor that must not be lightly discarded when comparing two groups one of which is obviously marginalised.

Why must it not? I discard that factor as lightly as you'd discard the inference that elephants' tusks are made of keratin based on the factor that we have an example of a hard protrusion made of keratin on another kind of pachyderm. Define "marginalised". Show that the people "marginalising" Irish Catholics and Jews were doing the same thing to them as those "marginalising" transgendered people. Show that turning to crime is a direct reaction to being "marginalised", and is neither caused by some second factor that happened to the Irish Catholics and Jews in parallel with being "marginalised", nor mediated by some third factor such as clannishness.

If you believe that development has anything other than a sociological explanation, ie that "criminal genes" were bred out of the Irish and Jewish gene pools within a mere couple of generations, I want to see your math to show that's even remotely plausible!

There are no differences between any two groups of people, except how others treat them, and their DNA? Our lineage abandoned that whole ill-conceived abortive flirtation with "culture" when we split off from the other great apes?

Culture has a larger part in shaping humans than it has for any other extant (or for that matter, extinct) species I know of, and I believe I've implied as much in this thread when talking about sexual orientation.

We were however discussing biology. I claimed that it is biologically plausible that otherwise male individuals with biologically female cognition (to the extent that that's a meaningful concept) exist at rates well above what one might expect from the known, more easily determined, rates of other types of mismatched phenotypes. To which you raised as a counterargument that apparently crime statistics show transwomen as perpetrators at rates more similar to cis males than to cis females. This is a valid counterargument only insofar as transwomen's crime rates relative to those other groups are largely caused by biology.

(Also, nitpick: we never split off from "the other great apes". We split off from panini (like the Italian bread, indeed), that is the lineage that would become chimps and bonobos; the other other great apes had split off long before that. That might actually be more relevant than it seems at first sight, especially when talking gender, sex, and sexual behaviour, areas in which humans and bonobos are both pretty weird in their own, but overlapping, ways: even if chimps are more of a standard ape than either of us, parsimony doesn't dictate that it's more likely we evolved the trait separately. Humans and bonobos independently switching to state B from an ancestral state A preserved in chimps and shared with orangs and gorillas requires no fewer steps than chimps reverting to state A from an LCA that was more human and bonobo like.)

 

[Jarhyn]

I give you the history of (gang) crime in NYC and New England. Less than a century ago, the scene was dominated by Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendents, with a significant Jewish component, two groups that were being given a hard time by old-time New Yorkers. Half a century later, the O'Connors and Rosensteins of NYC were for the most part accepted as old-time New Yorkers themselves and behaved the part, with Puerto Ricans and African American immigrants from Dixieland and the Caribbeans taking over their former role.

Are you suggesting you can prove a generalization with an example?!? That's not how it works. I already disproved the generalization with a counterexample.

I didn't say it's the only significant factor. I said it is a factor that must not be lightly discarded when comparing two groups one of which is obviously marginalised.

Why must it not? I discard that factor as lightly as you'd discard the inference that elephants' tusks are made of keratin based on the factor that we have an example of a hard protrusion made of keratin on another kind of pachyderm. Define "marginalised". Show that the people "marginalising" Irish Catholics and Jews were doing the same thing to them as those "marginalising" transgendered people. Show that turning to crime is a direct reaction to being "marginalised", and is neither caused by some second factor that happened to the Irish Catholics and Jews in parallel with being "marginalised", nor mediated by some third factor such as clannishness.

If you believe that development has anything other than a sociological explanation, ie that "criminal genes" were bred out of the Irish and Jewish gene pools within a mere couple of generations, I want to see your math to show that's even remotely plausible!

There are no differences between any two groups of people, except how others treat them, and their DNA? Our lineage abandoned that whole ill-conceived abortive flirtation with "culture" when we split off from the other great apes?

Culture has a larger part in shaping humans than it has for any other extant (or for that matter, extinct) species I know of, and I believe I've implied as much in this thread when talking about sexual orientation.

We were however discussing biology. I claimed that it is biologically plausible that otherwise male individuals with biologically female cognition (to the extent that that's a meaningful concept) exist at rates well above what one might expect from the known, more easily determined, rates of other types of mismatched phenotypes. To which you raised as a counterargument that apparently crime statistics show transwomen as perpetrators at rates more similar to cis males than to cis females. This is a valid counterargument only insofar as transwomen's crime rates relative to those other groups are largely caused by biology.

(Also, nitpick: we never split off from "the other great apes". We split off from panini (like the Italian bread, indeed), that is the lineage that would become chimps and bonobos; the other other great apes had split off long before that. That might actually be more relevant than it seems at first sight, especially when talking gender, sex, and sexual behaviour, areas in which humans and bonobos are both pretty weird in their own, but overlapping, ways: even if chimps are more of a standard ape than either of us, parsimony doesn't dictate that it's more likely we evolved the trait separately. Humans and bonobos independently switching to state B from an ancestral state A preserved in chimps and shared with orangs and gorillas requires no fewer steps than chimps reverting to state A from an LCA that was more human and bonobo like.)

I'll note the statistic on crime rates is misleading and outright wrong. This has come up many times, had a number of citations, and been ignored every time. If you would like to dig up the statistics on crime rates and transition, be my guest. That's yet another political topic, however.

Needless to say, trans prisoners represent a vast minority of prisoners, and while there is an unfortunate trend of people seeking trans validation for various reasons, these reasons are generally transparent and often enough do not accompany any kind of hormonal or pregnancy-theoretic intercession.

Maybe you can find it from the last time this was brought up?