The more likely event is that persons such as you describe would not even recognize a transgendered person.
We would if they publicly admitted it.
(I say we because, enlightened as I am, I have no confidence that I wouldn’t at least be weirded out upon meeting such a person. They are alien to my experience.)
My problem with this argument is that it assumes a commonality of experience across more than three billion people that simply does not exist. There are going to be women who, for a variety of reasons, have had vastly different experiences than is considered “normal,” to such a great extent that I challenge anyone to define what “normal” means in this context. A woman who was raised by loving, understanding parents is going to have a vastly different childhood than one raised by violent, abusive parents. A woman raised by rich, socially connected parents is going to have a vastly different childhood than one raised by poor, disenfranchised parents. A woman whose first schoolgirl crush was on the captain of the football team is going to have a vastly different childhood than a woman whose first schoolgirl crush was on the captain of the cheerleading squad. If all of these radically different experiences can be united under the banner of “women,” I don’t see any rational reason to exclude women whose childhood included being raised as a boy.
Re: Luxury items.
We live in a capitalist system where gender issues are capable of being resolved through expensive medical procedures. So yes it is a luxury. Not many people outside of the 1st world could acquire such a procedure.
As far as the suicide rates are concerned I would like to know more about how they are derived. How do they account for the ones who adapt to their situation, don’t commit suicide and never reach out for psychiatric assistance?
As far as ‘Moral Majority’ I am not treating it as a moral issue. It is most of the people who have responded that are treating it as a moral issue. I am looking at it amorally, and thinking in terms of social equilibrium. I simply do not see why the feelings of one person are more important than the feelings of several people.
Pioneers throughout history have suffered as pioneers. Even though awareness is close to total in our society of transgendered individuals, most people still find it to be strange. I disagree that social disruption is irrelevant to the capacity to do one’s job, particularly when it is in a social situation. This person’s co-workers voted to fire him.
Yes, I see suicide as a decision.
I’ve met 'em and they weird me out. But I don’t mind having them around. I’m a SubGenius, I like weirdness.
Do you care to alter your definition of “luxury item” any further, or is it permissible to respond to your amendment here? “Not necessary to sustain life + expensive.” Any other additions to make?
I will look for some studies on this subject, but I suspect your heart isn’t in it. You appear to be hand-waving away the possibility of any suicide risk by assuming that there are enough transgendered people out there who just “adapt,” enough to skew the suicide statistics into meaninglessness.
So which is it? Either the risk of suicide is small, which means there are a lot of transgendered people and we must accommodate them from sheer numbers; or the number of transgendered people is small, in which case they are at great risk and must be accommodated. You appear to want to have small numbers of transgendered and small risk of suicide.
You feel that the majority gets to vote on how the minority should feel, act, think, and behave?
Business is not democracy. Would you let your co-workers vote to fire you on the grounds that you were, hypothetically speaking, insufficiently sensitive to their needs?
Not many people outside of the first world can afford clean drinking water, either. What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?
Yes, you’ve made you amoralness perfectly clear. The reason the rest of us feel its a moral issue is pretty simple. By changing her sex, Stanton has harmed no one in any way, shape, or form. Her decision to have a sex change is therefore not a moral issue. By firing Stanton, Stanton’s employers have harmed her financially, socially, and emotionally. By deciding to offer harm to someone who has offered no harm to them, her employers have acted immorally.
True, but irrelevant. Stanton is suffering because she is a pioneer in this area, but that fact alone does not excuse the infliction of suffering on her by her employers.
How, precisely, is it a social disruption? Please be specific: what exact actions are her coworkers forced to either take or avoid as a direct result of her having a sex change?
And they are, therefore, bigots, and deserve all the opprobrium society can muster. With any luck at all, this behavior will shortly be criminal, as well, although it will by then be too late to help Stanton in this particular circumstance.
I’ve noticed, incidentally, that you’ve sidestepped every single other attempt to analogize this case to other historical incidences of prejudice. If my co-workers and myself got together and decided that we didn’t like working with black people, and we “voted” to fire all the black people in the office, would that be worthy of condemnation? Why would that be? Why should the feelings of the few black people that work here be more important than the much larger number of white people?
Or if he had a nose job?
So the soldier who gets his legs blown off is wearing luxury prostheses?
I wouldn’t have a choice. If I were a salesman and I had chronic halitosis and couldn’t gain contracts I would be fired, even though it’s a medical issue. If I were depressed and were difficult to relate to I wouldn’t be advanced.
Here is a scenario for you. I am an IT person, I work largely alone in a back office somewhere. I am perpetually drunk and acerbic. No one gets along with me, but the servers are always working the way they should. Are there grounds to fire me even though I am doing my job adequately, or does alcoholism as a ‘disease’ exempt me from social standards?
That doesn’t mean a thing. There are people in the world who can’t afford food; does that make eating a luxury ? Just because a society can’t meet a need doesn’t make it not a necessity; it just means that the people in question will suffer or die.
Because they are bigots, and because it is unprofessional of them to make this into an issue. And it IS a moral issue.
Do you say the same thing about the horribly disfigured burn victim or someone who’s just plain ugly? How about the single mother? Where do you draw the line?
I don’t know where you’re going with this, but the constitution was designed to protect people who are in the minority. There are certain things that the majority’s opinion cannot influence. This guy may have gotten fucked over, but that doesn’t make the fuckers right.
Strictly speaking yes. I say this recognizing that this was a dramatic appeal to emotion.
If my mixed doubles partner gets a sex change, then I am for damn sure finding another doubles partner.
To be fair, it is a social disruption, because the co-workers are insufficiently acclimatized to the idea of transgendered people to be able to react normally to it, and too insufficiently open-minded or mature to be able to adapt to the new situation.
And please don’t suggest that the obvious solution is to fire everyone but three people on the city commission.
There was indeed a disruption. Firing Stanton was an assholish way of dealing with it. The obvious way to approach it would be to let Stanton keep the job and then to wait and see which happened first: the majority of the council getting over it and acting like mature adults, or the hellish experience of working with people who are bigoted against you driving Stanton to quit (or otherwise break down).
If your work is getting done, and you are meeting the demands for which you were hired, then your alcoholism doesn’t enter into it.
If the worker’s alcoholism began to affect job performance, the proper thing to do is to document the loss of performance, reiterate the standards, and speak with the employee. Follow the procedures, up to and including termination.
That’s not what happened here, from what I can tell. The transgendered person announced an intent to have a sex-change operation and was immediately fired, even though no documented loss of performance was done. Termination was assumed based on a biased guess of future performance.
The analogy to this case, where the worker was fired because “maybe, one day, Lord willin’ and the crick don’t rise, it might affect his job performance, in a bizarre set of circumstances,” would also justify not hiring somebody who smoked cigarettes because maybe they might take an extra two minute break, or not hiring a woman because she has a fertile uterus, or not hiring a person with glasses because “Well, what if he loses them? Think of the drop in job performance that might one day create!”
There are millions of drunks who do their jobs adequately for their entire lives and no, they don’t get fired. If you’re an asshole, you’re an asshole and you should be fired for that. They two are separate issues.
This wasn’t a dramatic appeal to emotion. It is one of many situations that just might not sit well with the easily ooged out. Tough shit. If you can’t handle it, maybe you’re the one who is disrupting the workplace.
Define asshole