Lighthouse

Your friend can deal with her issues however she likes. I’ll even call her Dave and he/him in polite conversation for the sake of being civilised but that doesn’t mean I forgo my own attachment to reality and half a billion years of the evolution of life on earth. If you think a women can take a load of testosterone supplements which cause abnormal hair growth and a deeper voice and become a man, you can have that belief but you’re talking about some other, made up definition of gender that I have no interest in and you certainly have no right to impose on the rest of society. Your definition of mutilation it’s textbook. It’s severe, irreversible damage, done deliberately to a perfectly healthy, functioning body part. You brought up FGM; ironically those girls are still able to reproduce after this barbaric practice. It may be forced, rather than voluntary, but their organs still just about function in the way they are designed. If you find that description somewhat horrifying well… tough because the most literal and accurate word I can think of to describe what is happening. It’s a coping mechanism to a serious mental health problem, not all coping mechanisms are necessarily wise or healthy.

Box….. of…… frogs.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66045177 Who's feeling brave then?

You were more fun when you pretended to be Kenyan.

No, you’re thinking of sand people. In all seriousness though, they found some fairly well preserved remains in the wreckage of Air France 447, two years after it crashed in the mid Atlantic, so I’d imagine it’s a similar story here. I’d imagine they’re quite badly crushed and possibly burned, depending on the severity of the air pressure change.as skint says, grim.

Nobody is jumping around and screaming, that’s just sinister hyperbole to try and make this seem like a problem for angry, gammon bigots, or whatever you want to call them. Whatever word you want to use for biological men, they don’t belong in women’s changing rooms, sports or other designated separate spaces. Your rights, beliefs and freedoms end where another persons begin. If you believe you’re a woman trapped in the wrong body, that’s up to you but it’s nothing other than a feeling, women aren’t obliged to change they way they are treated by society because of it.

Hysteria implies an excessive amount of irrational emotion, I've given nothing but an accurate definition of mutilation. You can come up with your own definition if you like but there was zero emotive language in anything I've said. As for saving women and children, earlier you claimed you could, "earn the right," to see women naked, based on whatever you chose to call permanently inhibiting reproductive organs. You can do nothing of the sort, even if you literally save a womans life it does not give you her consent to do anything whatsoever. I'm not talking in absolutes and you aren't dealing in nuance. You're simply insisting upon nuance because a small group of very vocal people want it to be true.

Names are for tombstones. Unlike WSS, I’ll take the second sentence at face value and simply say that I am genuinely sorry that society has failed them in this way. The fact that we don’t seem to have a better solution to serious mental health problems than cutting off perfectly healthy organs and pretending its true is, to put it mildly, unfortunate.

On behalf of this forum I’d just like to say, that was a cracking goal against Blackburn mate!

I cannot believe that you can't see the difference there? Surely you aren't equating potentially life saving, necessary medical procedures with a cosmetic removal of a perfectly healthy and normally functioning bodily organ. A mastectomy is a drastic last resort, which is only utilised after all other treatments have been exhausted. Most women who undergo it find the resultant asthetic side effects deeply upsetting and traumatic. That's honnestly one of the most ignorant takes I've yet seen on this subject.

It’s a very cheap tactic to try and paint the opponent as hysterical, irrational and dramatic. There was zero emotive language in anything I posted; it’s genital mutilation by very clear definition. If you’re performing a surgical procedure on a body part, which is detrimental to the point that it is rendered completely unable to function as it should, that’s a mutilation. It may be voluntary but that’s what it is. You’re rendering yourself permanently unable to reproduce.

I wish KP would shut up.

Yesterday at the gym. It’s a communal changing room with no individual cubicles, only benches and lockers. TBH it’s all besides the point and deflects from the core issue: There are places which are designated as separate for women for their own protection, which you cannot simply ‘identify’ your way into. Intersexuality is a completely different issue though. I don’t think anyone is doubting that there are people with genetic and hormonal abnormalities affecting their genitals and body development. It’s like trying to argue that a blonde Scandinavian man can chose to become a black Nigerian man, because Arabic, Hispanic, Germanic etc. exist in between. As you alluded to, it’s a serious mental health problem, but I can’t think of any other similar issues which are dealt with quite so bizarrely as this. If a young woman is anorexic we don’t have surgery to remove a couple of her ribs and throw a skinny pride rally. If a paranoid schizophrenic hears voices, we don’t call other people bigots for says that demons don’t exist. To that regard I find this whole thing rather bemusing. I think history will look back on this like the exorcisms of schizophrenics and epileptics of centuries gone by.

In other words, a woman has to accept a man being able to see her naked, on the proviso that he’s had his genitals surgically mutilated. The only fair line in this is proven biological facts, you cannot subject people to laws written loosely around other people’s feelings.

My recollection/understanding at the time was that anybody who could stump up the cash for the period of exclusivity was allowed to do so, they then had to prove their credentials to take it further. With regards to that, BT did nothing wrong, they just applied the rules.

Say whatever you like, they still managed to get relegated spending a lot more money than we have. Those are hardly jizzing my pants signings either, especially with their better players being past it and Maddy heading off to Spurs.

All you’ve done there is taken away the only factual definition of the word ‘woman’ and so are left with an empty shell of word. It sort of sounds plausible because the word comes with the comfort blanket of familiarity but really ‘woman’ has no definition at all in that context. To elaborate on that, let’s remove that familiarity and replace the words we know with made up words. I can say a ‘zoog’ is a person born with testicles, a ‘queb’ is a person born with ovaries and the difference between them is called ‘ziggle’. The definitions still hold water as those truths will always be true and a baby growing up with those words will understand exactly what they mean. I can see ‘ziggle’ on an application for, write ‘zoog’ and everyone is perfectly clear on what that implies. If, on the other hand, you say that someone can choose to identify as whatever ‘agori’ they choose, my chosen agori is a ‘bilto’ and a bilto is anyone who chooses to identify as a bilto, that’s all just meaningless gobbledygook. A salad of words with no actual definition, just words identifying as themselves. All of which just leads us back to Hitchens’ Razor and the short answer; you don’t actually have any argument.

The fact that his rebuttal is based on simple, year 9 biology is a poor reflection of your argument, not his. It also raises one of the most tedious and frustrating elements of this debate; the continuous and deliberately engineered ambiguity of words like ‘gender’ and ‘woman’. The same people will simultaneously argue that, "trans women are women - end of!" And then roll their eyes and say, "obviously gender identity is different from biological sex," a minute later. You can’t keep moving the goalposts any time someone shoots.

So you're basically allocating human rights based on prettiness. 'She' is a biological man, claiming to identify as a woman, which is literally no different to something I could go to the gym and do right now. You have arbitrarily decided that 'her' gender identity is valid (and mine presumably isn't) based on little more than hair length and cup size. If you want to have a boob job and wear dresses, crack on it's your body and your style choice. If a biological man finds the idea of being in a changing room with other biological men distressing, that's a serious mental health problem.

You're avoiding the point though. We've all used mixed changing rooms with individual cubicals, that's not always feasibe, especially when space is at a premium. When I was at school you were lucky to get your own clothes peg.

That's entirely the point though. When you start diverging away from proven scientific facts into subjective feelings about someone's own paradigm of gender, there're no lines or rules anymore. Someone who cut their wedding veg off and started taking estrogen 20 years ago is no more a woman, factually speaking, than I am sat here saying, "you know what, I feel a bit girly, I might gender identify as a woman for half an hour or so." You can argue the semantics of this until the cows come home but the stone wall between right and wrong ultimately comes down to this; nothing you believe supercedes a woman's consent. Esentially you're putting a woman in a position whereby she is forced to believe your own personal beliefs, because if she doesn't, she's being forced to strip naked in front of strange men.

Yes but they're plastic fans. We're supposed to be getting rid of them in the Championship.

The problem is, it has crossed the line to the point it is making a difference. In many peoples eyes, you are no longer allowed to acknowledge the fact that Sam Smith is a man. There are people who genuinely consider it a hate crime if you don’t refer to ‘them’ by ‘their’ pronouns. That’s without even getting into the much more serious issues of changing rooms, prisons and sports. If the rest of the world were able to completely ignore whatever you’re claiming to identify as, it’d be fine but we can’t.

Should help fill the power vacuum in the boardroom.