minnow

If you're the person being arrested, your options are to surrender or fight and hope they only beat you within an inch of your life without actually killing you (with the understanding that the chances of them killing you are increasing every day). Unless you manager to use legal force against them in which case you are 100% dead.

Community defense is when OTHER people come to rescue you, typically using nonviolent methods to harass and inhibit the agents until they give up and leave. Of course, the chances that agents will just kill them are increasing every day, too. Either way, once you've been targeted you'll likely need to go into hiding, and engaging legal council is probably a good idea even if you're a citizen.

I don't think this is pessimistic or nihilistic. I feel like it's a pretty accurate assessment of the likely possibilities. I'm open to hearing other interpretations, though.

It doesn't matter if it's a blue or a red state if there aren't any more elections because they've been suspended because of war with, say, NATO.

The absolute least we can do is force them to jump through the hoops. Like, I get that it feels pointless but it's better than just giving up and letting them do whatever they want.

They WANT you to feel like there's no point so that you'll give up. They want you to give up because that's the easiest way for them to win. Why give them the satisfaction? They haven't actually won yet, but even if I can never win I'll won't give up no matter how impossible the victory, and neither should you.

Maybe then TERFs are finally going to drop the F, like they should have a long time ago.

Just because they mandate body cams doesn't mean the agents are 1) wearing body cams, or 2) turning them on.

This is a fascist regime, they'll say anything and do whatever they want. Policy and reality aren't connected in any meaningful way. All you've pointed out is that they're either lying or ignoring policy, both of which are par for the course.

Ah, I think I see where the confusion is.

The "positive" or "negative" identification is in relation to what the person claims. So if a person claims to be a woman, we can use science to determine either "yes this person is definitely a woman" or "maybe this person is a woman." What we can't do is say "no this person definitely isn't a woman" because it's possible there is some factor we haven't identified or discovered yet which would validate their identity.

Edit to add: actually, I can think of ONE test to prove that somebody who says they're a woman but isn't: gender transition to the gender they claim to identify as. Cisgender people usually get severe gender dysphoria if they attempt gender transition. I would consider that proof positive that they aren't the gender they claim to be. However, subjecting somebody to such an experiment without fully informing them if the risks and/or against their will is massively unethical which, imo, disqualifies it for the purposes of this conversation. But technically it's an option.

That's probably because I wasn't writing a rebuttal per se, but a clarification. The distinction is important because, although he's incorrect to say that we have no means of identifying if somebody is a women besides them honestly self identifying, we also don't know if we have found all the different means by which a person may legitimately be considered a women. We can positively ID a person as a certain gender, but we can't negatively ID them as not a certain gender.

So I guess the direct answer to the question about if we can identify a woman outside of a person self identifying is "sometimes". Certainly, allowing people to self identify is easier than forcing them to take a bunch of tests and MRI scans only to get results ranging from a "yes" to "maybe"

I'm not super familiar with what specific aspects of the brain are different between men and women, but the fact remains that there are differences at least in the manner in which the brain processes certain input related to sex & gender, as well as the cortical homunculus (which I suspect is probably the area of greatest contrast and even that's pretty minimal).

Science has also looked at the question about difference in ability and found that there's no statistically difference in the brain's ability between men and women. So no, this isn't a dangerous question that's going to lead to a slippery slope of claiming that women are less able than men. That claim was already being made and has already been investigated and debunked.

No, I'm saying that the lack of any particular medical criteria can't be used to invalidate anybody who genuinely identifies as transgender.

No, transmedicalism is the belief that somebody isn't actually trans unless they meet certain medical criteria. I'm saying the opposite: that the lack of any particular medical criteria can't be used to invalidate somebody being trans.

As for your second question, how a person behaves is a matter of nurture more than nature, but it's also deeply engrained from a very early age. Even those trans people who put the effort in to overcoming this socialization can have old habits they struggle to get rid of.

Here's the thing: there's a real answer to that question.

What makes a trans woman a woman is her brain has developed as a woman's brain. This development is set in progress while still in utero, and can become apparent as the relevant parts of the brain develop later. This is why many tabs people report realizing they were the opposite gender between the ages of 3 and 8.

Here are a number of studies that show the biological reality of transgender people. It’s important to note that although some of these studies suggest causation (ie, HOW a person is born transgender) we can’t know if there’s more than one cause, and therefore using any one test to see if somebody is “biologically trans” is impossible.

Sex vs Gender and the role of the SRY gene specifically (as opposed to the Y chromosome generally) in the development of each, as well as the possible role of AR (androgen receptor) gene https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6505576/

A correlation is found between AR allele repeat length and a person being transgender https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3402034/

The brains of trans people more closely resemble those of their chosen gender identity than their natal sex https://www.ese-hormones.org/media/1506/transgender-brains-are-more-like-their-desired-gender-from-an-early-age.pdf

A trans person's brain more closely resembles their chosen gender as demonstrated by their brain's response to olfactory stimulation with androstadienone https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2014.00060/full

Estrogen signaling pathways identified which tell the brain to develop as one gender or the other, as well as mechanisms by which physical development can happen in one way while brain development can happen in the other https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53500-y

Cornell University summarizes 72 studies regarding the effect of gender transition on transgender well-being (with links to all 72 studies) https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/

No.

This is like my grandma wants to kill every groundhog in the world and is working on it one groundhog at a time, then she buys magic beans that the seller promises will make groundhogs easier and faster to kill after she plants them, but the seller is also a violent murderer and says that if she doesn't buy them and plant them then he'll stab her. So she buys and plants them, not because of the threat but because it's what she wants to, and then she goes on killing groundhogs but now it's faster and easier.

You see, the words "willing" and "tricked" are antithetical in this case. The threat is incidental to the story and, on a narrative level serves no purpose but to characterized the seller as evil; he didn't threaten her because the threat was necessary to successfully extort her, he threatened her because it's in his nature to threaten people. The threat doesn't change the outcome in any way.