Here’s an example of standard transvestigator methodology, consistency, and accuracy:
Megan McArdle: People are shockingly good at visually distinguishing males from females, even when you choose relatively androgynous models, and even when you strip visual cues like hair.
…
Megan McArdle, a little later: My experience is that the people who misgender me are generally not really looking at me. They are store clerks, security guards, etc who have glanced my way, registered “tall”, converted that into “man”, and then called me “sir”.
Shockingly good.
She’s a regular columnist for the Washington Post, which, using her typical logical analysis, simultaneously looks like a liberal newspaper and is easily mistaken for a conservative rag.
Hey! She wrote a book titled “The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.”
. She clearly specializes in contradiction disguised as a deepity.
So, women from North Africa practicing boxing would be men because… contradiction?
So, she has personally been misgendered multiple times, yet still thinks that people are “shockingly good” at correctly gendering strangers.
Okay, then.
It’s pretty damn obvious that when transphobic cis women say “We can always tell”, they basically mean “We can always tell a biological male if we err on the side of assuming maleness in ambiguous cases”. Insert some misapplied rhetoric about Schrödinger’s rapist and women’s safety.
They don’t think it’s a big deal if many cis women (including themselves) are occasionally mistaken for men. They think that’s just a natural consequence of people being inherently wary of men posing as women.
I think that’s an accurate description of her schtik, which is what I expect from “asymmetricinfo”.
Experts think? Self-appointed right-wing gender police on the internet are always claiming their opinions are supported by mysterious ‘experts’. You would think they might notice that her teammates, opponents, coaches, officials, and anyone who actually knows Imane Khelif are quite sure she is a woman as well as an Olympic gold medalist.
I have noted that they base their expert opinions on photos that are taken in mid-bout, while faces are contorted with effort and the boxers are wearing their mouthguards.
People are shockingly good at visually distinguishing males from females…
Actually, we tend to THINK we’re perfect at it, because yes, we do tend to get right about 99.9% of the time. With the particular people we see in our daily lives, that is.
And once we’ve assumed we’re so totally good at it, then whenever we see someone we can’t easily pigeonhole, that can only be because that person went way out of his/her way to deceive us, for reasons that can only be nefarious.
See how easy that is? You too can be a transvestigator! Get your badge and decoder-ring and start doing your part today!
She clearly specializes in contradiction disguised as a deepity.
Great vastness can be found in small minds!
Girl, 12, wins Maryland’s top fishing prize — to the chagrin of some ‘older male anglers’
So…is JK Rowling gonna say that girl is actually a boy pretending to be a girl?
Imane Khelif is suing Musk and Rowling.
I hope she financially guts them like fish.
Actually, humans are shockingly bad at determining people’s gender.
At a grocery store I shop at, once there was a guy working there that i found visually interesting.
He was very tall, muscular, and heavy set. What stood out though was his long hair he wore in a braid halfway down his back.
Then one day while I was buying cat food and he was checking, he asked me about my cat.
In a very high soft voice.
Yeah, he was a she.
We talked for a little while about our cats.
So what happened here?
Not everyone fits the usual gender stereotypes
This was a tall, muscular young woman with…a cat.
People like her are “shockingly good” at… literally everything they do!
I remember them ferreting out “gays” from when I was a kid. They could ALWAYS tell – and Liberace was NOT gay, women like this horrid person declared.
They also, could sniff out negroes “passing.”
She compliments a certain kind of ultra-smug ignorance, which has always provided the horrid person doing so with a decent amount of celebrity and income, sometimes only for a short time and sometimes till they (finally) died.
How are they at ferreting out…Jews. And these days Muslims.
How are they at ferreting out…Commies!!!
There used to be big money in ferreting out commies. IIRC, the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy all made careers (for a while) out of ferreting out commies. People of the GOP and Fox NoNews are still ferreting out commies.
How are they at ferreting out…atheists! There are known atheists frequenting Freethoughtblogs.
How are they at ferreting out witches and heretics! They could get a job with the Catholic Inquisition easily.
We can see the pattern here.
Megan McArdle is a witch hunter hunting down modern day witches to persecute them and harm them.
There are a lot of modern day witches that they call gay, Trans, Muslim, Progressives etc..
“Transvestigators” seem like a solution in search of a problem to me … when they aren’t simply a problem, usually of the “harassment” sort.
Frankly, unless you’re contemplating dating someone, there’s not much reason to care what they’ve got in their pants or what their chromosomes look like. (And if you’re pansexual, perhaps not even then.)
I mentioned this in the most recent thread following the bullying of Imane Khelif, but Matt Bernstein and Natalie Wynn have a video discussion (released a couple of days ago) covering the current egregious trend of bigots doing transvestigations, and I recommend it if you’re interested in a couple of smart and funny trans people digging into the whole tin-foil hat world of the “we can always tell” cult.
(And yes, I accidentally posted this comment in the wrong thread, so treat that mistake as trying to double the reach.)
In a culture imposing numerous gender norms, of course distinguishing men and women is easy.
She turned me into a newt!
Well, birgerjohansson, you got better!
People are shockingly good at visually distinguishing males from females…
Reminds me of a hetero couple I knew some years back. He wore a beard, so didn’t face much misidentification; she was taller than he, but for a period lost her hair due to chemotherapy, and during that interval they got street-harassed as gay men.
Perhaps McArdle has a covert plan to re-stereotype the Irish as irredeemably stupid. If so, she’s off to a good start!
I just finished watching the “transvestigation” video, and it was quite good and covered just about all aspects of this whole fake-ass moral panic. Thanks for the cite, Xanthe. The only thing I can add is to emphasize that Carini accused Khelif of being a man based on ONE punch in ONE round of ONE fight. That’s literally the only real data-point all this cyberbullying campaign is based on. And ANYONE can get a lucky or unusually powerful or well-aimed blow against ANY opponent in ANY fight. It’s not very probable, but I’ve seen it happen.
And as for athletes having their gold-medal dreams destroyed in an instant, that can happen anywhere too. If Simone Biles had been one inch off in any part of her floor routine, that would have destroyed her dreams too, and maybe also caused serious injury. It sucks and may be unfair, but it does happen, and finding scapegoats to bash doesn’t change any of this.
In my opinion, it is fine to rationally discuss the rules, regulations and eligibility criteria for professional sports and to try to come up with compromises that allow the most number of people to compete while evening the playing field as much as possible and ensuring the safety and the well-being of the athletes, e.g., by combating doping, allowing safer equipment and so on; afterall, all the sports are made up. But as far as I have seen, the vast majority of people who are bothered by Imane Khelif’s victory are not doing this and they are certified assholes, specially when you read about her life. Her story is heartbreaking and inspiring and I really cannot forgive anyone who misgenders her and calls her a “he”, “a man” and shit like that based on contradictory information that is available to us.
lotharloo@20,
Of course if safety was the real concern with regard to boxing, there wouldn’t be any boxing. Getting repeatedly hit in the head, headguard or no, is bad for your brain.
@KG:
I honestly don’t know much about boxing so I don’t know if the headguard’s protection is enough but at least olympic requires those protections unlike “professional” boxing which is basically a blood sport.
lotharloo@22,
What’s bad for the brain is apparently when the head is hit so it very rapidly twists on the neck, which a headguard wouldn’t stop. The brain doesn’t keep up, and bangs against the skull. There is evidence that amateur boxing increases the probability of later dementia, and decreases the age at which it appears. The linked article suggests banning blows to the head. I guess that would be an alternative to ending the sport altogether, but intuitively it seems like it would be very different.
14 Xanthë
That is the best video on the whole “Algerian boxer” ‘scandal’ by far. Everyone (who cares) should watch. (Natalie Wynn is ‘Contrapoints’ for those in the know, but here she’s the guest/interviewee.)
Funny, I’m a very regular guy who more often than not sports a beard, but when I had long hair I’ve heard comments like “let’s let these Ladies pull out”. <- I was backing out of a parking spot with my wife In the passenger seat.
Yea, people are great at instantly identifying gender, and are never thrown off my some insignificant gender stereotype like hair length.
PS: If anyone is still wondering why #QElon bought Twitter for so high a price at such a huge loss…THIS IS WHY. #QElon saw a hugely popular and widely-used global communications platform, and wanted nothing more or less than to own it all himself and make it his own unstoppable propaganda organ.
@KG:
Fair enough. Also, I learned men’s olympic doesn’t even use head protection for a while which I guess shows how much I know about boxing. I guess this all aligns with my belief that boxing is a shit sport.
I can’t speak for all trans women but myself and my small group of friends, but we find actually do have pretty decent talents at determining gender. Not 100% obviously, but years of living in denial and cloxking ourselves does tend to make one quite good at reading gender ques that I find most cis people don’t notice. Even with this huge percentages of people are very androgynous when it comes down to it, because unless you are at either end of the phenotypic spectrum or are presenting specifically in a gendered way you kind of just fall in that ambiguous middle range. Most people pick up one significant que and then just go with it unless they are thrown another sharply divergent que or are corrected. Long hair no facial hair —> “hello mamn.”