I think the pronoun debate is losing the forest for the trees a bit. There’s a lot more to making a space feel safe for people who are trans gender than getting the pronouns right.
In my opinion, the most important thing to make a minority of any sort feel safe here is a firm commitment to call out any form of personal disrespect and/or bullying.
Yup.
But also:
Really, pronouns aren’t that big a deal. Unless you are being a jerk by deliberately using the wrong ones. (emphasis on DELIBERATELY). Bullying people, disrespecting people, challenging people’s life experiences are all more troublesome.
You’re probably right. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but claiming that mentioning detransitioners constitutes questioning trans identity is exactly the sort of slippery slope I am worried about. The other reason I object is that for some people, identity is the whole of their argument. “Trans women are women and therefore they have an absolute right to play women’s sports/be transferred to women’s prisons/get a job in the female-only rape relief centre.” And it’s hard to argue against this if you can’t challenge their premises.
I think you’re missing the point. It is your argument which is supposed to work even if you admit that transgender identities are valid.
ETA: See Troutman’s point from above,
~Max
You can challenge everything after “therefore”, but there’s no value in challenging that trans women are women.
An argument that “trans women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports because they are women,” with no further discussion, is a poor argument. “Trans women should not be able to compete because they are not women” is both a poor argument and insulting.
The bigger problem is that too often, the argument goes the other way. Someone says something about trans women, and someone chimes in that we can’t consider trans women the same as cis women because then sports competitions would be unfair. Sports had nothing to do with the original discussion, but now yet another thread is derailed by a “woman or not” debate, same as any discussion of transgender validity leads to studies of teenage desistance.
As long as we allow debate on those fundamental tenets, every thread eventually reaches that point.
Even though we can agree that transwomen are women, that doesn’t mean that transwomen are equivalent to all things under the women umbrella. The women umbrella used to encompass these things:
Just adding transwomen to the women umbrella does not necessarily mean that things setup for women prior automatically also pertain to transwomen. I feel that transwomen fit under the women umbrella because they embody a new concept that the women umbrella didn’t previously encompass, which is:
I don’t think that transwomen should have any requirement to conform to any aspect of what would stereotypically be thought of as a woman. If someone feels like a woman, they are a woman, period, end of story. It’s a concept or state of mind rather than a genetic code, a particular appearance, or pattern of behavior. However, we need to realize that lots of things in society have the descriptive adjective of woman because they were named that way at a time when woman only meant an adult genetically XX person. Now that literally anyone can be under the women umbrella, we need to examine those things that have a woman label to understand how this new definition of women aligns with the original intent. In some cases there is no significant issue with a transwoman fitting right in (e.g. Women’s Billiards), but in other cases there are legitimate issues and it’s much more complex to see how transwomen can fit (e.g. Women’s Boxing).
So basically, I think the discussions regarding transwomen are women will be much more productive if we can agree that transwomen are under the woman umbrella, but not everything under the woman umbrella is equivalent and interchangeable.
In Great Debates at least a post like that really needs to get flagged quick so the Mods can intervene hopefully quick and prevent the hijack and then the 40 car pile-up.
This is really the point. But can we agree that?
Maybe the real question is - what does it mean to say ‘transmen are men, transwomen are women, and non-binary/genderqueer people are valid’? Does it mean using the correct pronouns, or does it mean that treating trans and cis people differently under any circumstances whatsoever is discrimination by definition? Because it’s the latter that stops debate.
…from the Elliot Page thread:
The kind of “casual swipe” that was moderated here in this instance was the kind of casual swipe that had been normalized to a great extent here. Making this sort of thing no longer acceptable is definitely the way for the boards to go IMHO. I do have my opinions on the general debate (about what should be allowed to be debated), but I don’t want my voice to drown out the opinions of the transgender posters here, who I think really need to be heard on the subject.
I personally would like to see (at least) this sort of moderating applied throughout the board. Thank you puzzlegal for the moderation and Whats_Exit (and the rest of the moderators) for facilitating this discussion here.
And we’re right back to Max_S’s flawed premise from the OP…
“Treating people differently” is not necessarily discriminatory. “By definition” discrimination involves unjustified difference.
For some things, like some sports, some debatable justification exists that doesn’t question the validity of transgender identity. But the real question is whether one side can have just that debate without doing so. So far, they have not all shown that they can, IMO.
Seconded.
If someone wants to identify as, to use hyperbole, a maple tree, they should be permitted to. One can think its a silly thing to identify as such and it might be, but something which looks silly to one party can be fundamental to another. There needs no debate on this topic since the views of third parties there are rarely relevant.
The only time it becomes a “debate” is when it can actually (not hypothetically) be used for fraud or misrepresentation or be misleading. For example, Caitlyn Jenner cannot deny that she was once publically known as Bruce Jenner and as a man and there can be debates on what the sports record should read, should it be amended or not and if so how much (for what its worth convention for similar cases like for married women and conversions such as Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali have been to use the name which was used when the event occured).
No, it becomes a debate when recognising someone’s deeply felt identity has real world impacts on other people.
The biggest reason for a debate is that as a society we have decided that while segregation of races is always bad, separating men and women in some areas is good, because there are real and consequential physical differences between the two. And note that unlike racial segregation, most of this separation is intended to benefit women, the less powerful group.
This causes problems when we have people who identify as one or the other, but don’t have the associated physical differences. Sports is the most obvious example of this; it is clearly unfair and in some cases dangerous to women if a minority with male bodies are allowed to compete in women’s sports. In the extreme, if we decide that the labels ‘men’ and ‘women’ are unrelated to any physical differences between people (the logical consequence of current thinking), then there is no longer any moral basis for allowing segregation at all, and everything must become mixed-sex. This would be even more harmful to women.
Would I be allowed to say this under the new rules?
Segregation in sports isn’t just based on gender. Its also based on age for youth tournaments, weight for combat sports. Not to mention, nationality for eligibility criteria for representative contests.
Heavyweights boxers aren’t permitted to fight bantamweights and older players aren’t permitted to play youth tournaments, so why would there be any resistance or resistance from reasonable people as to such segregation. There will obviously be some cases that are less clear cut, but those can be dealt with using bespoke solutions as needed.
Thirded.
Don’t ask me why anyone thinks it reasonable, but the equivalent is happening in real life with women’s sport. The IOC and great majority of national leagues do allow transwomen to play in women’s sports. Many but not all require hormone suppressants that reduce the advantages (but only partially according to the best scientific evidence). So it’s a pretty relevant thing to debate.
Even under current rules it would be OK to say that in a thread about transgender people and sports. Or a meta thread like this as an example. If the thread is not about sports or not about transgender people it would be much more of a threadshit.
When this happens, we need people to Flag the offending post as Something Else and please explain the post is off subject or a threadshit. This is especially true in GD and P&E, but actually true in every forum.
ModNote: And lets not actually debate or discuss the actual sports issue any further in this thread please.
To get all pedantic on you, discrimination by definition is recognizing differences. It’s politically BAD discrimination when we treat people differently in unjust ways due to discrimination. Like recognizing that this person has more melanin is a form of discrimination, but isn’t bad. Deciding I don’t want to hire this person because I think that melanin correlates with traits a, b, and c (rather than directly judging my candidate based on whatever markers of a, b, and c I’d use for a person with less melanin) is unjust discrimination.
We are still hashing out the rules, and I can’t say for sure. My inclination is that it ought to be possible to have a polite, respectful discussion of the issues transwomen raise in sports. But we might be convinced otherwise.
One thing the group of mods who are discussion this are missing is any actual trans people. If anyone reading this is trans, and would like to weigh in, please PM me. I am reaching out to a couple of off-board friends, but of course, they don’t really understand this massage board.
If you do PM me, you can either discuss these matters privately with me, or you can join the group PM with a couple of mods and possibly a couple of additional posters. Either way, I promise the respect your privacy and not reveal more about you than you choose to make public to the board.
Not the definition on Wiki, or the first definition in Merriam-Websters, or Oxford.
The element of prejudice or unfairness is a necessary part of all those definitions. They do not distinguish that as only being “bad discrimination”. So I think you are wrong in your pedantry, and your example of recognizing melanin differences is not discrimination the way I (and those dictionaries) are using it. Or the way most people understand the term, IMO. It is a valid definition, but not the primary one.
Oh well. Language changes, and I am old. What I think of as the primary definition has become the second definition in the on-line dictionary I just consulted. Ignorance fought.