Thursday, July 22, 2021

San Francisco DA's office embraces brave new grammar

 Press release: June 30, 2021: “Today, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced a bold new policy to promote respect for the gender identity of all people encountering the criminal legal system. . . . The policy directs all San Francisco District Attorney’s Office staff to both inquire and then use correct pronouns, names, and titles for crime victims, witnesses, and the accused in a criminal case. . . . The policy also requires prosecutors to ask the defense which pronouns should be used for anyone accused of a crime, and to document and use those pronouns throughout the pendency of the case.”

  PETITION TO BE ADDRESSED AND REFERRED TO BY ROYAL PRONOUNS

1 Now comes gender-enlightened Petitioner and, consistent with the Hon. Chesa Boudin’s bold and inclusive pronoun edict, earnestly asks to be addressed as “Your Highness” and referred to as “His Highness” in all courtroom proceedings and court filings.

2. From earliest childhood, Petitioner has been identified as royalty. Petitioner’s birthing person (“mom” in pre-gender liberation parlance) was known to refer to the Infant Petitioner as “His Majesty.” Similarly, Petitioner’s birthing person’s inseminator (“dad” in pre-gender liberation parlance) was known to refer to Petitioner as “a Jewish prince”).  Similarly as well, Petitioner’s identified-as-female-at-birth-and-identified-as-chronologically-subsequent-at-birth sibling (“little sister” in pre-gender liberation parlance) was known to refer to Petitioner as “King Doofus.” 

3. Though wry or even disrespectful, such descriptions reflect a due acknowledgment of Petitioner’s long-standing transroyal status. Petitioner declares and embraces this princely or kingly identity, consistent with an obnoxious desire to regard others as commoners or peasants. Petitioner also wonders whether he* [to use oppressive oldspeak, pending recognition of preferred pronoun*] can cancel people at whim by making vexatious official complaints about instances of misroyalizing and royalphobia, which are sadly rampant in our society. 

4. It is pure discrimination and egregious noninclusivity to deny Petitioner’s royal gender identity because, by pure accident of birth, his lineage traces to Brooklyn shopkeepers and then to Chicago schoolteachers and accountants and not to Windsor Castle.  

5. Petitioner recognizes that the Hon. Chesa Boudin’s policy does not specifically mention lawyers, but only “victims, witnesses, and the accused.” But surely this is a mere oversight, and inconsistent with the policy’s bold and inclusive intent. It makes little sense to allow a criminal complainant, defendant, or witness to choose zitz or zatz own precious pronouns, but to not accord attorneys the same protection from the grievous psychic harms of grammatical clarity.  

6. Indeed, Petitioner knows, or imagines he knows, that many a grizzled criminal defense lawyer and prosecutor has been reduced to brokenhearted tears because judges persist in imposing the cruel and outmoded binary formulation of “his” and “her” rather than adopt such valid, inclusive, and beautiful preferred pronouns as “ishkabibble,” “zipadeedoodah,” Pi to the 131st digit, or the complete lyrics to “Over the Rainbow,” whether recited forward or backwards or translated into Albanian. 

7. Petitioner’s request is certainly no less reasonable than other hypothetical gendering requests that would seemingly be granted under the express terms of the Hon. Chesa Boudin’s bold and inclusive edict. For instance, it would appear that a rape complainant in a criminal case can be compelled  to refer to her alleged rapist as “she” and “her,” even if the defendant identified as male when the incident took place and even if the defendant looks, sounds, and behaves, at least to the gender unenlightened, like a football linebacker with unconventional fashion and grooming preferences. 

8. Petitioner acknowledges that gender liberation ideology and parlance largely arose from the theorizing of hyper-privileged and avowedly progressive academics. Nonetheless, he dismisses as conspiratorial or phobic any suspicion that these high-status individuals were motivated to promote their careers on the backs of their marginalized group identities or to pad their CVs by producing gibberish in the guise of scholarship or to indulge in the narcissism of identity politics in lieu of discussing and acting upon such substantive and urgent progressive concerns as climate change, income inequality, and mass incarceration.

9. In considering his modest request, Petitioner asks that notice be taken of the wise precept articulated by noted legal philosopher Humpty Dumpty, who declared, “When I use a word. . . it means just what I choose it to mean– neither more nor less.”

33 comments:

  1. Nice to see His Royal Highness the celebrated Dybbuk back in the saddle again, this time with an amusing slap-down of a perhaps well-meant but ill-considered policy.

    I certainly respect and value transgendered people. But the foolish policy cleverly impugned in this article seems to bolster the reputations of a few presumably cisgendered bureaucrats at the expense of the people whom they purport to serve. Paragraph 8, construed a contrario, shows what's really going on here.

    On top of that, there are obvious flaws in the policy. (At least they're obvious to Old Guy.) Paragraph 7 illustrates one of them. Although the policy does not, and cannot, force the complainant to speak in any particular way, it would create an awkward and hostile environment for her as the prosecutor appeared to frame the accused as female, thereby undermining the case for the prosecution. (I suppose that in that unusual situation I would say "the accused" and avoid personal pronouns or other gender-marked references.)

    As the article points out, only "crime victims, witnesses, and the accused" are interrogated about their preferred personal pronouns. Is it simply assumed that lawyers and judges will necessarily be cisgendered?

    The inquiry is intrusive, forcing people to commit to a position something that they might not care to discuss—and to invite comment on it if their preferences don't correspond to the interrogator's assumptions. It may provoke embarrassment in transgendered people who do not pass well. It reinforces binary gender by privileging he and she (maybe also they, which Old Guy refuses to use in the singular), for one can hardly imagine studious adherence to instructions such as these: "Well, you must refer to me as ze in the subjective case but as hem in the objective. Actually, make that hem in the dative; you must use hin in the accusative even though that case had merged with the dative by Late Middle English. I also have several possessive forms, plus a special set of pronouns for use on holidays. And instead of we in the plural, I demand…"

    People may justly fear inviting disapproval from judges, lawyers, juries, and the general public by drawing attention to their gender identity, particularly if it falls outside the mainstream.

    It seems unlikely that the practice would be applied scrupulously to everyone. Is a 95-year-old Black lady whose purse was snatched likely to be asked whether by chance she prefers to be treated as anything but female? Predictably this policy will be applied in practice mainly to relatively young white Anglos of relatively comfortable socio-economic status.

    All in all, a foolish and unnecessary policy. Dybbuk was right to expose it.

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  2. I thought this article was from The Onion (a satirical website).

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  3. When will there be a policy that says that if I self-identify as a fourteen-year-old regardless of what me birth certificate says I have to have my murder case transferred to juvenile court?

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    1. Does the analogy work? Transgendered people don't ordinarily adopt a gender identity for fraudulent purposes.

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    2. My cynical response would be that there are people of all genders and sexualities willing to do practically anything for a fraudulent purpose provided they think they can get away with it.

      Another matter-- I bring this up delicately and acknowledge that it may be based on my own ignorance-- is the underlying question of the validity of an identity based on a professed feeling (gender, age) where that feeling does not accord with objectively verifiable facts (anatomy, date of birth).

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    3. 6:07 here. First, who's to say that someone who self-identifies as an age that is inconsistent with their birth certificate isn't completely sincere? Second, I think dybbuk123 is not ignorant. Medical science regards transgender identity as a delusion. Maybe radical surgeries can aleviate the problem but the reality is suicides are as common after surgery as before. And another delusion is people with four healthy limbs who self-identify as amputees. Apparently there are physicians willing to saw off a leg to "treat" them.

      I don't have time to care about how anybody else dresses but I worry about tiny minorities dictating whole new versions of reality to everyone else. And isn't what Chesa is doing government-compelled speech? DO we really want to go there?

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    4. Lots of identities aren't based on objectively verifiable facts. There's nothing objectively verifiable about a person's (ir)religious identity; it's just whatever the person says that it is. Plenty of non-believers still associate themselves with a religion for social purposes.

      What about nationality? There's nothing objectively verifiable about that, unless you equate it with citizenship (which is not ordinarily done, at least in the US). Millions of Yanks call themselves "Italian" or "Irish" or whatever just because of Great-Great-Grandma's place of origin.

      Race is not objectively verifiable; it's a social construct, not a biological reality. That's why it varies across place and time. A century ago, people of Irish or Scandinavian descent were not considered white in the US. The category "Black" is much broader in the US than in Brazil. And although within the same time and place there is broad agreement about the "racial" classification of many people, not everyone can be categorized so neatly—and again we're dealing not with objectively verifiable facts but with cultural criteria.

      As for gender identity, no one here has objectively verified that Old Guy is male by examining his sex chromosomes or his genitalia, yet everyone seems to accept him as male. Actually, the name "Old Guy" was assigned about ten years ago at Paul Campos's Web site by a stranger who knew nothing about my gender. It isn't based on anything objective.

      And I respectfully propose that that may be the source of the confusion. Categories such as "woman" and "man" are not strictly biological; they come with lots of social expectations and impositions. Our lives turn out very differently because of the arbitrary assignment of a goddamn paternal sex chromosome. Transgendered people typically are much more concerned about the social aspects of gender than about biological sex. Most transgendered people don't seek surgical alteration of their bodies, and of course they can't do anything about their sex chromosomes; they do, however, want to be socially accepted as being of the gender with which they identify, and I don't see why they shouldn't be, if they are sincere. After all, we accept people as male or female all the time on the basis of their presentation, without prying into their biological characteristics.

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    5. I'd like to see the evidence for the claim that "[m]edical science regards transgender identity as a delusion". Even if that were true, how would it help? It is objectively true that many people do associate themselves with a gender different from that of their biology (which itself doesn't always come down conclusively on one side of the male–female dichotomy), and even if those people exhibit "a delusion", their feelings are what they are.

      I haven't heard of anyone's claiming to be an amputee when that isn't so. I don't know much about those who wish to alter their bodies by having a sound limb removed, but most physicians would regard that practice as unethical, and one would be hard pressed to find a hospital that would allow it.

      I'm not so troubled by the social influence of "tiny minorities". Disabled people were a "tiny minority" when Old Guy was a boy, because they were hardly ever seen in public: accommodations for wheelchairs, handrails in washrooms, braille, and the like scarcely existed outside institutions for disabled people, so going out in society was just not practical, and consequently people with various disabilities were kept cooped up out of public view. The cost and inconvenience of accommodating this "tiny minority" were the subject of vociferous complaints. Now we know that the "tiny minority" isn't so tiny after all. People with mental or emotional issues used to be a "tiny minority" because of social stigma, but now the public is much more informed and much more understanding of conditions such as depression. Likewise, gay people used to be dismissed as a "tiny minority" of deviants, but their "tiny" numbers turned out to stem from social opprobrium that kept them "in the closet". And although few people thirty or forty years ago had a charitable word for gay people, nowadays most people not only accept but also respect them. Has society learned a valuable lesson or two from these and other "tiny minorities"? I think so.

      Perhaps we're moving far from the topic.

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    6. My thinking is that there are identities that one can declare oneself into and that there are others one cannot because of biological or other limiting factors. I will leave aside the touchy subject of sex/gender and consider 6:07's factor of age. A person born exactly 35 years ago may declare him or herself to be an 88-year old elder or an 8-year old child, and the declaration may be completely sincere. This person could point out that biological age has an arbitrary or inconclusive quality in that people mature at different rates and do everything he or she can to present as a child or a senior. Such a trans-ager is entitled, like everyone, to dignity and respect. However, I do not believe he or she can reasonably demand that society provide him or her with the same benefits, entitlements, and expectations as it would to someone for whom being a child or a senior is an inescapable condition as opposed to a preference, choice, or feeling.

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    7. Yes, but why should there be benefits, entitlements, and expectations linked to gender? For age, it's easy to see the reason: age consistently reflects the physical and mental development of an individual, and often at the extremes it is linked to ability and need. In addition, age is not a stable part of anyone's identity; it changes with every passing year, and everyone who lives long enough goes through all of the various major categories of age and experiences the associated benefits, entitlements, and expectations. I've never known of any sane person who sincerely regarded herself as being dramatically older or younger than she was, nor of anyone who treated her age as a stable and enduring aspect of her identity.

      Gender identity, by contrast, is relatively stable (which doesn't mean that it cannot change), and there are few compelling reasons for benefits, entitlements, and expectations that differ on the basis of gender. In fact, however, society does box people in according to gender, usually without a compelling reason. Why exactly should men be subject to disdain and harassment if they choose to wear a skirt, high-heeled shoes, jewels, or makeup? Why is it illegal in most parts of the US, and unacceptable in all, for a woman to expose her chest when a man is free to do so? (This distinction arose during the 1930s, before which time neither men nor women were allowed to expose their chests in public. Of course, there are many societies in which exposing one's chest is perfectly fine or even expected in many or all contexts.) Why are some forms of behaviour "ladylike" or "manly"? Why are men assumed to be sexual predators if they want to teach kindergarten, while women have no opportunity to play football professionally, indeed at all? (The late lawyer Florynce Kennedy said "There are very few jobs that actualy require a penis or a vagina. All other jobs should be open to everybody.") Why are cooking and sewing "women's work" while household and automotive repairs are "men's work"? Why is it socially difficult for a man and a woman to have a non-sexual friendship when two men or two women can easily do so? Why are many toys, hobbies, magazines, even things like soap directed at one gender only when they have nothing important to do with bodily differences?

      It is such socially imposed differences that lead many people to identify with a gender other than the one socially assigned to their biological sex. We can even say that transgender is a product of gender oppression. Since transgender rarely has much to do with genitals or chromosomes or reproductive functions, it might well be less common in a society that didn't so sharply circumscribe people's lives on the basis of a glance at their groins when they were born.

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    8. OG, I agree with almost everything you said (eloquently as usual) in your second and third paragraphs. The assumptions and expectations related to gender that you name are mostly oppressive and should be challenged and overcome.

      However, there are a small number of circumstances where it is unfair to ignore that natal males (or whatever term one prefers) are, in the aggregate, relatively stronger physically, have a relatively stronger sex drive, and are relatively more aggressive than natal females-- and that these relative differences are rooted in biology. That is why many feminists believe, and I agree, that sex segregation (as opposed to gender segregation) is a reasonable accommodation in prisons and in most sports.

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    9. That's reasonable. Although I won't comment on sex drive, I freely admit that natal males tend to be larger and stronger than natal females; it's an aspect of sexual dimorphism. A minimum height for firefighters (I'm glad that this term has displaced "firemen") has been successfully challenged on the grounds that it discriminated against women without being a bona fide occupational requirement.

      Someone recently told me of a trans-woman who was outcompeting cis-women in some sport, thereby attracting controversy because she was male-bodied and thus had certain physical advantages that made a nearly insuperable difference. I don't pay much attention to sports, but it seems to me that boxers and wrestlers are classified by size (weight, if I recall correctly) and that perhaps something similar could be done for athletes in other domains. In the meantime, perhaps segregation by sex in some sports, notably those in which size and strength are important, isn't inappropriate.

      On the other hand, segregation of this sort is common even in areas where it is not justified. For example, why should there be separate chess tournaments for men and women? Size and strength make no difference in chess. Gender-segregated public toilets are also inappropriate. (When Old Guy was born, racially segregated public toilets were just being phased out. Today they seem barbaric, yet we maintain gender segregation for no better reason.)

      For those of us in the legal field, I should look up a fifty-year-old case in which a man successfully sued for access to the job of flight attendant (we said "stewardess" back then). In defense of its discriminatory hiring practice, the airline said, among other things, that it had to have female flight attendants because the mostly male passengers might feel their virility diminished if they found themselves being attracted to a male flight attendant. Interesting to see how far some people will go in defending the existing structures of dominance.

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    10. By the way, Dybbuk, since you mentioned prisons, it's worth noting that segregation for the sake of protecting people could be taken further. It is well known that many male inmates are abused physically and sexually by other male inmates. I can't claim to know much about managing prisons, but apparently protection of inmates calls for segregation on grounds other than sex alone.

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    11. As far as flight attendants go, I'll share what my father once explained to me. (Noting first that my father travelled extensively on business and had served as a naval officer in WWII, so by his death he had visited all fifty states, D.C. and every present-day U.S. overseas territory except Samoa.) He said that in the age of passenger rail passengers were more or less at the mercy of Pullman porters who were notoriously surly and had to be fed a steady stream of tips if you expected them to help you. As part of their efforts to lure passengers away from the rails and into the skies the airlines hired attractive, personable young women who were ready to help you with anything with smiles on their faces and who were forbidden from accepting tips. It worked and it worked very well. As the old man also said, few tears were shed when the Pullman porters got theirs. So I think that the airlines were stuck on a winning formula that was no longer doing them any particular good. You see that occasionally in business. When I flew as a child the stewardesses were all young and svelte, but the doors were later opened to older and slighty more curvaceous women.

      Now, on to sports. Weight might cut it in some areas but not all. Fact is, women and men have very different pelvises; women's tend to be wider and shallower. Whether you want to credit God or evolution the result is the same - a woman's pelvis is designed to facilitate child bearing. But because of this, women's thigh bones leave the pelvis at a different angle than men's, and because of that women's knees work differently. Both of those differences give men a huge advantage in running and all the estrogen shots in the world are not going to change skeletal structure by the time you are old enough to decide you're transgender. In my state two boys who were mediocre track athletes at two different high schools decided they were girls and were allowed to compete in girls' track. They went through state records like a scythe. The videos look like a Monty Python sketch, with a "transgirl" way out ahead of the pack. Every year they've competed two real girls haven't made it to the state tournament who otherwise would have. I know how OG feels about athletic scholarships but right now they are the reality on the ground and these "transgirls" are hurting the chances of real girls to get one.

      But we live in the age of the hater. If you question this you are a hater. In Salem Village, Masschusetts Bay Colony in 1692 if anyone disagreed with you you just had to call them a witch. In the 1950's we had McCarthyism; call someone a communist and the discussion was over. Now the buzzword is hater. Track and field is perhaps not a big thing but we have much to fear from this latter-day form of McCarthyism.

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    12. It's perfectly true that male physique creates permanent advantages in a great many sports (not all). Bones are one; breathing is another, and I understand that there are also significant differences in muscular development. I don't mind accounting for these facts by dividing competitors into reasonably appropriate groups. Golf tournaments, if I'm not mistaken, sometimes divide people by age, because the best 80-year-old probably wouldn't do well in a group of good 30-year-olds. There are also separate competitions for people with various disabilities, and the general public recognizes the fairness of having these.

      On the other hand, there are many other relevant criteria that are never taken into account. Let's start with money and opportunity (which are related). Entire sports are off limits to all but the rich. I don't even know where one would engage in luging, for example; apparently it's only for aristocrats, and the great unwashed don't even get to try it. Golf, skiing, sailing, hockey, anything involving a horse—all of these are very expensive, and typically those who do well got a start as small children. Someone who takes them up later in life doesn't stand a chance, yet the public credits any achievement to the individual, without considering the influence of the individual's background (largely an accident of birth). Even in the more accessible sports, opportunity makes a big difference: some people profit early on from a family (such as a parent who excelled in the sport), lessons of high quality (usually expensive, so again money comes into this), and free time, all of which offer significant advantages.

      Then there are bodily distinctions that appear to be disregarded despite being relevant. Is there a basketball league for short people? Shouldn't there be one?

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    13. Luge, maybe, because you've got to live near a luge/skeleton/bobsleigh run which wipes out the south and the great plains, cold though they may be, and probably a lot of the northern Rockies where there is just too much snow. Golf, however, has had many greats who grew up middle class or worse. Palmer's father was the pro-head greenskeeper at Latrobe Country Club, meaning it wasn't much of a club. Nicklus grew up middle class and was an all-around great athlete at Ohio State. Ben Hogan grew up dirt poor after his father's suicide, he learned the game when he got a job as a caddy to help support his family. But here's the thing with golf. My best friend in law school played on his high school team and was a scratch golfer. He did not make the cut at the university level. He told me how his high school coach had told him that his technical skills were good enough for the PGA tour "but you will never be on the tour because you don't have the necessary concentration."

      Great athletes are born, not made, although you are correct that there are probably a lot of unknown greats out there who didn't have access to the right sport.

      I would have no problem with competition between tansathletes in sport where they would have an unfair advantage.

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    14. Luge isn't necessarily only for the elite.

      https://www.teamusa.org/USA-Luge/NEWS/2021/April/29/White-Castle-USA-Luge-Slider-Search

      If I was 9-13, I would beg my folks to participate in this.

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  4. Here's a novel concept: how about the DA worry about, you know, prosecuting criminals and leaving the pronouns to English class.

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  5. Oh c'mon, it's just a way to score some political points with the base in a way that doesn't cost anything and needs no approval from any legislature. The far left will like it, the far right will hate it (but they never would've voted for you anyway and they definitely won't be voting in your primary) and the people in the middle won't care. Perfect for a little insulation against a primary challenger without hurting one's chances in the general election. For example, you could do a big bold initiative like announcing some huge crackdown on police brutality via aggressive charging policies, but that's too controversial. For a democrat it'd help in the primary but it'd cost too many votes in the general, not to mention pissing off the police and likely causing them to make the day-to-day work of the office in run of the mill cases more difficult.

    It's no different than lots of stunts that presidents (on both sides) pull with executive orders, and you can't really fault the elected official for the fact that this is how the game is played. Indeed, were any of us in that seat we'd be well-advised to find similar gestures (or their opposite equivalent, depending on party).

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    1. Well, I'm of the far left, and I don't like it. Predictably it will work out badly, and then transgender people, rather than the administrators in question, will be blamed for the fiasco.

      Political log-rolling isn't properly the job of the courts. A better way to defend the dignity of transgendered people is to ensure their right to use the lavatory of their chosen gender without harassment.

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    2. Well, both the notion that trans people would be "blamed for the fiasco" and the original post seem to assume that pronouns simply aren't REALLY all that important to nonbinary people and if any say it is, they're either just looking for something to complain about, or have an ego of the sort parodied in the original post, such that being referred to as they/them is similar to demanding to be referred to as "your highness."

      My experience is that for nonbinary people, their pronouns really are important to them. Now, do people unintentionally mess people's pronouns up? Sure. But the only reason to intentionally refuse to use a preferred pronoun is to hurt and belittle someone in an unprofessional way, so it's really hard to fault this policy unless you simply don't believe nonbinary is "real," which is exactly why it should be a politically safe/good move for the actual elected official except (for the most part) for its lack of popularity with bigots whose votes needn't be courted anyway.

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    3. I identify generally with the far left as well. But for me (and OG), but not for many others, this political orientation is about making needed changes in government and society, not about posturing, tribalism, or careerism. If I think conservatives are correct about something, or partially correct, I will say so.

      Certainly transgender persons should use whatever bathrooms they want. However, I am far more skeptical of the current pronoun carnival-- it gives me the uncomfortable sense of being gaslit by narcissists and, taken to its logical conclusion, will lead to the results I parodied in my original post.

      I will add, though perhaps I should not, that I think that some policies or practices deemed gender progressive should be examined with a skeptical eye and debated without fear of cancellation. Here I refer to incarcerating natal males (or whatever term one prefers) in women's prisons, allowing natal males to compete in the women's category of sports where they will have a significant advantage based on anatomy, and prescribing hormones and puberty blockers to children deemed gender nonconforming.

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    4. I think the sports issue has been medically evaluated and found not to present a competitive advantage for M2F if total testosterone is below a certain level in testing, and has been below that level for a year. So you don't have to be post-op or whatever but you do have to be well established on hormone therapy. At least, that's the position from the International Olympic Committee as I understand it and I'd imagine the WNBA or whatever could do something similar if they aren't doing it already.

      As to prisons and jails, I think inmate assignment should be what it long has been: A classification system based on individualized risk determinations. They've always used that to set security level and in the case of transgender they could use it to assess whether any given individual should be in a male or female prison as well. You assess the threat posed by the inmate and the threat posed TO the inmate in any given placement and that consideration need be no different.

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    5. Does low testosterone, hormone therapy, or other forms of medical intervention really negate the strength advantage of post-adolescent natal males over natal females? Are "M2F" who have undergone these procedures more akin to natal males or natal females in terms of relative frequency of sex crimes or crimes of violence?

      These are questions that require an evidence-based discussion and research by specialists who are as insulated as possible from fear of cancellation, lobbying by fanatics, financial incentive, or even baseless accusations of bad faith (as with that comment that I refused to publish).

      If the evidence supports your point of view-- then, yes, my skepticism about eliminating sex segregation in prisons would be allayed. However, I do think that the burden of proof should be on the proponent. I hope you join me in not wanting the safety and dignity of natal females (or whatever term you prefer) to be sacrificed based on the recent and dubious rejection of the reality of biological sex by some activists.

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    6. I agree that "the current pronoun carnival" has been taken too far. Yes, a person who sincerely holds herself out to be female, or himself to be male, should be treated as such in most contexts (I have to agree that there may be marginal exceptions for certain types of sports, accommodations in prisons, and maybe a few other cases). That extends to using she or he appropriately. I don't agree, however, that I should have to adopt they in the singular or zir or whatever else someone has dreamt up. Nor do I support ill-conceived policies such as this one that put appearance ahead of substance.

      I gave several reasons above for opposing this policy. Anyone who wants to know my thoughts can find them at the top of this thread; there's no need to misrepresent my position.

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    7. I doubt very much whether a change in the level of sex hormones beyond the age of 20 or so can negate the sexual difference in the development of muscles. Certainly it can't do much about bones.

      I also doubt whether "individualized risk determinations" in prisons cross the boundary of sex. Certainly I have never heard of putting a particularly violent female inmate in with a group of males, if that is what is being suggested. It seems to me that violence within prisons is not managed particularly well even with separation by sex. But since this settler-colonial society is itself extremely violent, we should not be surprised.

      Dybbuk's question about the rates of violent crimes among transgendered people is interesting. I have to admit that I don't know the facts, although I have defended transgendered people against criminal charges. As Dybbuk said, the answer depends on evidence, not on speculation, presumptions, or biases.

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    8. I don't think the idea would be anything like making all prisons co-ed. If you are cisgender male you go to male prison, and if you are cisgender female you go to female prison, no question.

      But if you're not cis, i.e. you don't identify with the gender assigned at birth, THEN there would need to be an individualized risk-assessment to determine which prison to assign you to, which may or may not correspond to the gender you identify as - there is no such right in such a secure environment. Rather, in such cases it's about what best protects the inmate from others and others from the inmate.

      As to sport, no opinion on the subject as I'm not a medical expert; I'm merely saying the IOC which presumably does have such experts have apparently examined the issue and concluded that the requisite hormone levels, maintained for the requisite amount of time, satisfactorily eliminate the competitive advantage.

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    9. Why would the idea be to segregate prisons based on gender identity, as opposed to biological sex? I mean, gender identity, however deeply felt, is a person's self-description of that person's own feeling. One may as well segregate prisons by, say, favorite flavor of ice cream or whether the individual prisoner prefers dogs or cats.

      On the other hand, there is a clear safety and dignity rationale to segregate prisons by biological sex in that natal males (or whatever term one prefers) are relatively physical stronger, are relatively more aggressive, and have a relatively stronger sex drive than natal females.

      I do agree that prisoners who are particularly vulnerable for any reason, including gender identity, may require special treatment or protection. However, as noted, biological sex is its own category of vulnerability, and the protections accorded on that basis should not be eliminated.

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    10. "On the other hand, there is a clear safety and dignity rationale to segregate prisons by biological sex in that natal males (or whatever term one prefers) are relatively physical stronger, are relatively more aggressive, and have a relatively stronger sex drive than natal females."

      Those things are only true in a statistical sense. Always gotta be careful applying averages to individuals. When someone says "I identify as female and want to go to female prison" you assess them individually. What is the nature of their offense? What are their physical characteristics? How have they behaved in any prior incarcerations? What kind of violence propensity does their history and/or psych evals predict? How old are they (the male aggresiveness thing is well documented to decline markedly with age)? What does their medical workup say in terms of hormone levels and such? What kinds of facilities are available and what's the milieu there? Is there a good candidate (like a fellow trans) to be their cellmate? How crowded are each facilities? Are single rooms an option? Placement decision is multifactorial already; prisons devote a lot of resources time and technology investment to getting it right. Classification is critical and this just adds another consideration in what will presumably be a relatively small number of cases.

      And ultimately, is it in the institution and the inmate's best interest from a safety perspective to grant their request, or deny it? How often will we re-review the case to possibly change whichever decision is made?

      Again, no one is saying such request have to be granted, only that such requests can be made and if made, fairly considered as opposed to rendering them an absolute impossibility in all cases based on averages that may or may not apply to an individual case.

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  6. And the scam rolls on: applicants up 12.8%, applications up 26.4%:

    https://report.lsac.org/VolumeSummary.aspx

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    1. Yup.. Countercyclical. The worse the economy gets, the more attractive law school (and its offer to pay your rent for three years using income-contingent "loans" well over and above tuition) becomes. Thanks COVID!

      And let's face it, the economy is bad. At least, it's bad for jobseekers of the sort most likely to fall for a poorly ranked law school, i.e. the college graduates waiting tables. Yes jobs are going unfilled, but the jobs that are going unfilled are mostly crappy ones anyway.

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    2. Can't agree; the market for graduates of TTTs has been bad for two decades(or more) so the uptick isn't related to that, and the economy overall hasn't been bad-it's been a recession of minimum wage service workers and that's about it. Wall street is roaring along, the rich are literally getting richer.
      No, the huge increase in applications is related more to the sad reality that most of the applicants just don't do any research on their job prospects after law school. I admire this blog because it's literally the last blog standing, while once again there is a proliferation of websites touting "you can do anything" with a law degree. It's on the verge of being as bad as things were in the early 2000s, when every law school averaged near 100% bar passage and every law graduate averaged $100k annual salary.

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  7. WSJ had a pseudo scam article today about U Miami with broader implications. It was referenced in the Drudge Report.

    ReplyDelete