A even playing field would have been to have given the girls each a shot of testosterone.
That's right. People who take years off from the workforce to do other stuff will tend to get paid less than people who don't. It simply doesn't matter if the years you took off were to do something great like raise kids, missionary work, Peace Corps, or something not so great like drift from couch to couch getting high. It kinda seems like you're complaining about this obvious, unavoidable truth, but I can't see for the life of me what you expect anybody to do about it.
But then you’re trying to equalize the outcome by artificial means, not the opportunity (which I understand as making an even playing field).
The entire point of that example is that men are generally better than women at some things to such an extent that even males who don’t rank in the top 200 can easily beat the best female tennis player in the world.
You aren’t disproving that notion at all by saying that ‘if women were given a hormone which would make them more like men, they would play better’, because that is exactly the point - hormones and musculature are what gives male their physical superiority, nobody argued that it is something divine and beyond biology.
I expect nothing at all.
But… you don’t see a difference between making kids and other great things like missionary work and peace corps?
No shit. Women are better than men at ovulating. Is there a point to this argument?
I see a difference between everything and everything else. Nevertheless, if you trade job experience for doing other things- great things or terrible things, it matters not- the end result is still that you have less job experience, and in any kind of sane, free society, that will tend to result in being paid less.
Imagine you need to hire somebody for a job. Your choices are- A man with 3 years experience, a man with 2 years experience, and a woman with 2 years experience and a kid. Considering the woman as being on par with the more experienced man on the grounds that her lack of experience shouldn't be considered is foolish for the company, and sexist towards the less experienced man. Maybe the less experienced man was a soldier for that year and protected the woman's kid. Maybe a lot of things. However bad you think the situation is, encouraging/requiring an employer to value the merit of a person's non-work-related life above their job skills will make it worse.
This all becomes much simpler if you ditch the ingrained notion we inhereted from Marx that a person’s equality is determined by their economic standing.
How does feminism help men.
There is nothing at all wrong with a worker within a workplace being valued for his ability to produce work. That is not the problem. The problem is to value a worker for his estimated/presumed ability to produce work.
Which is all you can do when hiring someone you haven’t worked with previously. Less experiened people get less pay. It doesn’t matter why they are less experienced- there is nothing wrong with this.
Sure.
That’s why I’d agree to be hired on probation with a contract stipulation of an evaluation in 3 months.
However employers are not just looking at how much you produce, or the quality of what you produce. They also want to make guesses on whether or not you will continue to produce.
When I get denied that raise on the sole ground of being a woman in my late 20s to early 30s, that always sucks because I have to keep quitting and finding new work. You may think that it is smart for an employer to make this kind of calculated guess, and it probably is. But you can’t deny that this aches to arresting a negro because he might commit a crime.
(Don’t even dare to say I am whining about this. It is a statement of fact).
I gave that up. I’ve been working as a contractor for a while. They don’t seem to care if you’re a contractor. Sure, I’ll never have a lead role or seniority in a company. Don’t care. Just as long as they don’t have a potentially pregnant woman on payroll, they’ll pay whatever rate you ask.
Advise to professional women to whom the title and the recognition matter: Fertility is a huge liability. List on your resume “had full histerectomy”. And if they ask if you have kids, fight the urge to reply “none of your fucking business”, just answer “no”.
No, it’s illegal, is what I think, and statistics show us that it doesn’t happen often enough to be significant. When you correct for things like job experience and time taken off work, the pay gap all but vanishes.
Yeah, also illegal, and also something I doubt happens enough to matter.
It might be my damn luck, then 
Last time that happened I had some pressure in my family to sue them. But why ruin a perfectly good business contact amirite.
I dunno. Experience has taught me that critiquing/examining one person’s personal story as part of a political conversation never goes well.
true. just call it my bias.
Race is a social construction, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’m just open to the idea that we should willingly let the social construction decay, and one way to do so is to allow people to choose their racial identity.
Maybe a more interesting example is the one used by Radiolab, also involving a woman and her family disagreeing about what race they are, but this time her parents insist they’re black and the girl insists she’s white. But here society is likely to be less clear: the girl has ancestors that were freed African slaves, so that ticks the ‘black’ box, but she’s pale and red-headed and most of her ancestry is Scottish, and it’s more a matter of local convention that he family has been considered black (she does, after all, have the “one drop”). My position remains consistent: if she says she’s white, she’s white. What do you do here? Insist that she’s defined by 1/64 or less of her gene pool?
Except that the people with the nappy hair include Africans, middle eastern Jews and Irish redheads; the people with the dark skin include Africans, south-east Asians, Australian aboriginals, Pacific Islanders, and South Americans; the People with the flat noses include Africans, most of Asia, parts of South America… you get the idea. We can certainly do a Venn diagram of a handful of characteristics and point to the middle and say “Black”, but we could pick other characteristics that divide that center, or that create other overlaps unrelated to any social construction of a race.
I’m not denying genetic heredity or that some people look different and we can classify those differences, but race is much more than that. There’s a reason that Barack Obama is the “first black president” even though Rachel Dolezal’s parents would insist that one of his chromosomes is white.
But mental illness is partly normative. Women who thought being stuck in the kitchen all day sucked were considered mentally ill. Political dissidents and visionaries have been treated as mentally ill when it was convenient. Mental illness has a lot to do with the question, “does this person fit my conception of normal.”
As for the harm, I meant that a person changing their expressed gender identity doesn’t harm you or me. I don’t know that it harms them, because I am certain there is no evidence (insisting that a high suicide rate is sufficient evidence is like saying taking asprin causes headaches because almost everyone who takes asprin has a headache). There’s no control sufficient to empirically test the proposition that adopting another gender makes one worse off. One the other hand, there’s reason to believe that stoking the social mentality that wanting to be another gender is sufficient to condemn you to misery would make life worse off for anyone with that desire. And there’s every reason to believe that whether or not they do in fact choose to express another gender has no negative consequences for anyone else.
This seems question begging: “If we don’t make people feel bad about changing their gender presentation, then our children won’t either! and what kind of world will that be!?”
There’s a problem with centralized education to the extent that it teaches that there’s a right answer on any question on which reasonable people disagree. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know it’s not unique to gender, and that negative consequences it might have depend on demonstrating that the right answer being taught is actually wrong (because I can’t see the harm in teaching everyone that the right answer is right), or that the question is not a right/wrong question.
I disagree that the libertarian response depends on a world of mature adults nor on picturing social interactions as closed. It depends on a little rational humility: we don’t always know what we think we know, and while I would love a government that enforced propositions I agree with, I am willing to give up that prospect given the very significant risk that the government we get will enforce a bunch of propositions I find absurd.
As to closed interactions, as long as the externalities of interactions are equally good and bad, or (more likely) are more good than bad, libertarianism works with open-system interactions.
I’d argue tennis is actually a particularly bad example. One-on-one sports tend to exaggerate the significance of physical differences. So, for instance, in boxing and other fighting sports the competitors are divided into weight class, and even within the weight classes, reach is frequently determinative.
In a team sport like soccer, I would think that the team structure and the group strategy aspects would reduce these kinds of effects. Another factor is that, if you assume two soccer teams evenly made up of the best players in the world, there will be game situations where the best player in the world is face to face with the 30th best player in the world. Even thought the teams might be number 1 and 2, the players may have a wider skill gap.
This is a pretty interesting possibility. Take it further: what about a woman who started gene-doping in grade school, can she still compete in women’s sports? If we tear down the physical division between the sexes, we’ll have trouble keeping divided leagues, but it probably won’t matter because we’ll build the bodies to suit whatever purpose.
An interesting data point is a male-to-female transexual MMA fighter, who doesn’t seem to have an unfair advantage over the other women. Maybe we’ll start dividing leagues by the mix of hormones we require participants to inject before competing.
Racism may exist, but it is of no more significance that following the favour of a football team, and ‘choosing’ your race is about as important. Both can lead to violence.
Follow the reds or the blues, or belong to the blacks or whites. Humanity need so grow up and outlive childish tribalism.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeUNDbLT_Mg[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp4KTvMvqF4[/youtube]
(I actually met Ike Willis- the narrator ‘Thing Fish’- in Asheville years ago. After the show (Project Object…his Zappa cover band) we hung out in the back and talked. I bombarded him with questions about Frank, what it was like to work with him, his experiences in the band, etc.)
All taxonomy is a social construction, and race is just folk-taxonomy. Their is no question of 'allowing' people anything. Rachel was a liar manipulating the system for financial gain. She doesn't cease to be those things because you imagine a long-term political gain in encouraging her type of deceit.
The same thing you do with a mixed-breed dog: You declare that dog breeds aren’t real, and that a Schnauzer can be Pekinese if the owners say it is, of course. I’ll never understand the left’s obsession with corner cases. Gender isn’t real because somebody was born with a weird-looking dick this one time. Race doesn’t exist because mixed-raced people exist. Sure, your corner-case is a complex situation. But what about the literal BILLIONS of situations that aren’t complex at all, where you can tell somebody’s ancestry by glacing at them? Rachel Dolezal faking her race to pass a job interview makes sense because there are people out there with actual confusing ancestries?
Ah, and middle eastern Jews and Irish readheads are prone to glaucoma and the sickle cell? Are sub-saharan Africans and Irish redheads regularly confused? I used more than one criteria in my example. What you’re doing here would be like saying ‘dog’ is vague because bears also have four legs.
We can also analyze a large skull fragment or a blood sample in a forensics lab and say “Black”.
Right, and we would know that those groupings are bullshit because they don't actually define people according to their ancestral origins. Like your example of "Let's consider everybody with curly hair to be the same race", or a bad taxonomist (is that a thing) deciding that everything with four legs was a 'dog'.
Then why don’t we call him the “first mulatto president”? We had a perfectly good, objective word for the situation, but that word was tossed out as racist. So now, among the remaining words we are allowed to use, there is some imprecision. Nevertheless, it’s more accurate to call him the first black president than is to call him the first Eskimo president, and biological facts are the reason why.
This reminds me a lot of your argument about race above. It has the general theme of ‘confusing situations are confusing, therefore it’s ok to pretend straightforward situations are confusing too’. Not wanting to spend your life in a kitchen isn’t a mental illness. Thinking you are a woman when you are a man is a mental illness. I’m perfectly capable of seeing the difference, and I think we both know you are too, so I’m not going to play along with the ‘it’s all so subjective’ game here.
I know you did, but that's a useless definition of harm that doesn't answer any of the questions we're asking. A person mutilating themselves to help pretend to be a gender they are not harms themselves, encouraging the delusional state that justifies this behavior harms them as well, and spreading the misinformed notion of gender that supports these antics harms everybody.
This is hard to respond to. Transsexuals kill themselves at an astounding rate. The rate for pre-op and post-op transsexuals is essentially the same. Nobody disputes this. To you, this says nothing about transsexualism being harmful, because correlation doesn't equal causation. On the other hand, you are ready to believe all sorts of things about the evil of social stigma. I can only ask- based on what? What's your data, that's so much more grounded and compelling than the suicide statistics of transexuals? Because what I think is that you're just imagining it. You are imagining that a person who is picked on and criticized for wanting to be gender other than they are is going to be miserable and thus more likely to kill themselves. Fine. I am also imagining that a man who is told that if they want to be a girl it's because they were born with the wrong brain in the wrong body and the only way they'll be happy is to defy the expectations of everybody they know and cut their dick off and put on a dress will turn out to be miserable. It's entirely possible that both are true, but I actually have statistics to back up my imaginings.
Not dissimilar from your approach; "If we teach people a gender ideology that encourages them to be social outcasts and dissatisfied with their bodies for the rest of their lives, then WE didn't harm them, the people treating them like outcasts because they don't agree with our ideology did!"