That you were interested in answers was my initial default position. The more you post, the less reason I feel I have to continue to believe it.
Why? Now that people are actually addressing the issues I want to talk about without telling me I am an evil scumbag?
When you get bored, by all means shuffle off. That last post of yours was satisfying.
If you want to debate, you need to take a side and back it up with something. So far you haven’t backed up your ideas with any substance. Feel free to do so, perhaps by answering some of the questions asked of you over the last 8 pages. Until then, I think I’ve contributed all that I can.
You are simply repeating the same unconvincing responses you’ve been offering here all along, without adding anything to them in the way of logical substance.
The opposing position has reached a pretty firm consensus here, namely:
*Employees should not be undeservedly fired for modifying their identity/appearance in ways that meet the following criteria:
(a) it is legal;
(b) it is endorsed by the employee’s physician as an important and appropriate part of treatment for a serious medical condition;
(c) it does not interfere with the employee’s ability to do his/her job;
(d) it does not directly impede other employees’ carrying out their jobs.
*
We are not trying to argue that this approach is cost-free. Yes, sometimes it will strain a workplace or a community to adjust to the presence of a transgendered individual. Feelings may be hurt, comfort levels may be challenged, reactions may be awkward, heads may asplode. Nobody is saying that these negative consequences don’t exist or don’t count for anything.
What we are saying, though—what everybody still participating in this thread, except you, is agreed upon—is that these costs are worth it, for the sake of fairness to the employee who has done nothing to deserve being fired.
You have not managed to produce anything even faintly resembling a substantive rational argument against this position. All you’ve done is go on repeating “But there are negative consequences!”
Yes, Sherlock, we recognize that there are negative consequences. We are opining that society has a responsibility to accept transgendered individuals in the workplace, DESPITE the negative consequences.
YES.
If you disagree, then it is your job to make a convincing rational argument why it is NOT worth it. So far, you haven’t really gotten anywhere with this task; you’ve just flailed around repeating your earlier assertions and offering new hypotheticals that are just as pointless as your former hypotheticals.
And when anybody points out to you that you aren’t really contributing anything to this debate or making a successful case for the anti-transgender-acceptance side of the argument, you whine that you’re being called an “evil scumbag”.
Nobody here thinks you’re an evil scumbag. We just think you can’t debate your way out of a paper bag, and you are doing nothing to prove us wrong.
Why do you think transgendered people are so different from homosexuals? If an employee came out as gay, and 5 other employees who know the system don’t want to work with a gay person, should the gay person get fired? If not, why is this different from the case where someone comes out as transgendered?
Or, for that matter, why is it different if a black, Hispanic, Muslim, or female employee is hired into a previously all-Christian-white-male office, and some of the people that were there before are uncomfortable working with a woman, or someone of a different race, religion or culture? Saying “This person has to go because something fundamental to their identity is disturbing to our other employees” can lead to a slippery slope towards all kinds of discrimination.
Or what if the culture of an office is deeply and conservatively religious, and one of the employees gets divorced, or converts to another faith, and the other employees don’t feel comfortable around someone whose behavior offends their ideas of morality? (Assume here that the company’s mission has nothing to do with those religious values, but those values are shared by the vast majority of employees) Should the person who converted or got divorced be fired? After all, converting to a different religion or getting divorced are choices that people make, and why should one person be allowed to upset the other employees with their choices?
But, if you know the system and know where files are, can you get away with anything? What if one of those people who know the system were found to be stealing from the company? What if they came out as a raging homophobe, and demanded to not be required to work with gay people? What if they demanded the right to use company email to send emails promoting their religion? What if they demanded that the company lunchroom become a vegan-foods-only zone, because they are vegan and think animal products contribute to cruelty? What if they demanded that anyone living with a partner be fired, because they don’t approve of living together without being married? What if they demanded that adultery become a firing offense? What if they demanded that the company fire everyone they didn’t get along with? No company where the Powers that Be were in their right minds would acquiesce to that sort of thing, no matter how skilled the employee or how well they knew the system.
Part of professionalism is working with people you don’t necessarily like, or who might make you feel uneasy, or whose life choices you do not approve of, and putting aside those feelings to get work done.
You should seriously consider my observation to you in the Pit thread currently in your honor. You should seriously consider not rudely telling me to go away in this Forum just because you do not like my participation.
I didn’t tell you to go away. I said, that if you are bored with the thread I am satisfied with the last round.
Jesus, a bunch of nimrods blow their cool at me, I spend half a dozen pages trying to clarify my position, finally my position is clarified to some, but not to others enough that at least I get to follow the line of inquiry where I wanted it to go. In the last thread you made the best point anyone here has made so far, followed by a question of my sincerity. I tell you that the answer you gave me is satisfying, trying to be polite about not continuing a conversation that has been beaten to death by an angry mob, that you are starting to get annoyed by, and you turn that into some kind of personal affront.
Just because the intellectual elite can’t comprehend the difference between a genuine interest in the answer to my line of inquiry, and a base desire for me to be a bigot. If you don’t believe me that I am not trying to mess with you, then there is nothing I can do at this point. I’m not trying to mess with you in any way. Just because I am copacetic with transsexuals doesn’t make me any less interested in original question.
Yes your highness.
Kimstu I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I was exploring an issue. I presented a notion that I wanted to see debated so I could learn how people felt about the issue, and I argued what was proposed with counter arguments. People assumed that I am pushing some kind of agenda, I am not. Tomndebb finally got to the root of the matter, and made some very valid points.
I’m done justifying myself. I’m as tired of this thread as everyone else.
This is my last post here.
You’re the only one who has blown his cool in this thread, mswas. I think everybody should say it every page: It’s not about whether you’re a bigot, it’s about how poorly you’ve presented and defended the position you keep insisting you don’t have that nobody is listening to because it’s against the status quo you say is on your side. Or something, who knows anymore, the point is, pretending you meant to paint yourself into that corner so you could defy gravity and saunter up the wall only works if a demonstration immediately follows. When all you can do is jump around, everybody knows you’re just making stuff up to save face.
Then you shouldn’t be participating in a debate. When you debate, you’re supposed to be trying to convince your opponents of the correctness of your position, by means of rational argument. Even if you personally don’t fully believe in the position that you’re provisionally adopting for purposes of debate, it’s still your responsibility to make the best case for it that you can.
But your “counter arguments” were piss-poor. You never constructed anything like a reasoned and consistent defense of your (provisional) thesis that it’s okay to fire transgendered employees if their transgender status causes “social disruption” in the workplace. (And since nobody else in the thread agreed with your thesis, there was nobody else to take over that side of the debate.) Nor did you ever offer a reasoned and consistent rebuttal of the opposing position.
You just reiterated a bunch of feeble speculations and what-ifs along with vague rhetorical musings about “social cohesion” and “the needs of the many” and so forth. And whenever other posters pointed out how piss-poorly you were arguing, you retreated into playing the “PC card” and whining (inaccurately) that you were being called a bigot and a scumbag.
That’s probably just as well. I admire your enthusiasm and your perseverance, but I have to say you misjudged your capabilities on this one.
So that explains the illogic and wandering thoughts. :rolleyes:
Remember the movie Dick? (It showed Nixon eating cookies baked with marijuana.) “No wonder he was so paranoid!”
All of that crap can be learned in a short time. It’s absolutely worth it.
mswas, Let’s parse the central paragraph of your last response to me…
First you call a group of other posters stupid for being frustrated at your incoherent posts and hope the Mods do not notice.
If every single one of multiple posters misunderstood a point I was making (or a question I was asking), I would not have spent six pages beating it to death with ever more complex allusions and metaphors. I would have figured that I had failed to convey my idea and called a halt (or gone back to the beginning) and restated my point in very plain terms without any confusing allusions.
Last thread? Last page? Last series of posts?
However, let us examine my question of your sincerity. After I posted the same basic criteria on at least two occasions, you returned one more time to ask “What about…?” even though a serious look at my statements should have made it clear that I was going to repeat the same basic answer one more time. Perhaps it is only your difficulty in expressing and comprehending ideas and not a matter of just trying to ask the same question often enough to get a different answer, but it was that behavior, repeating essentially the same question multiple times, that prompted my question to you.
You should actually read your posts–perhaps before you submit them.
In the context of the preceding exchange, you first posted the rather snide
to which I replied
explaining that while I had initially accepted your posts in good faith, your behavior caused me to be suspicious that I had been mistaken. (Your behavior, in this case, includes simply repeating questions that had been effectively answered, making snide and demeaning comments about both transgenered persons and women, jumping out of the context of the thread to talk about reshaping humans into satyrs, and generally failing to respond to posts addressed to you in the manner that they had been presented.) Your reply to that was
In other words, rather than your claim that you complimented my point and then politely excused me from the the thread (when I had not expressed a desire to leave), you first whined that people had been picking on you (for your lack of a coherent point), then tell me to “shuffle off,” and finally tag on a vague compliment.
As I noted obliquely in the Pit thread, it almost seems as though you really are not able to post your thoughts in a way that conveys your meaning. If you think the preceding exchange represented “I tell you that the answer you gave me is satisfying, trying to be polite . . . and you turn that into some kind of personal affront.,” then I suggest that you really do have serious issues expressing yourself in written English.
Still waiting on an answer to this question, mswas. If it is, indeed, a strawman, it should be relatively simple to explain why the standards you’re applying to gender identity should not also apply to racial identity.
I think mswas has left the building. You could try catching up with him over at the parallel Pit thread.
You could catch his insightfult view of vegetarianism over here. The OP is an amazing analysis.
It’s a strawman because the issue is behavior, not skin color.
It’s amazing how easily superficial similarities can confuse you lefties. Of course, a cynic might suggest that this was an unusually dimwitted attempt to play the race card.
Not true. The issue is tolerance. There is no behavior being exhibited by the transgendered employee or the black employee that affects performance.
It wouldn’t do specific harm if I showed up for work wearing a sombrero, a muumuu and flip-flops, but if I did I would hope that somebody would be concerned and caring enough to take me aside and talk to me.
If you can require the rest of us to tolerate cross-dressing in the work place, what else can’t you demand? Why can’t you demand that we tolerate nudity or cannibal sandwiches as well?
What about someone who burns himself with cigarettes? What about a woman who starves herself into skeletal thinness because of an eating disorder? Are the rest of us supposed to pretend there’s nothing wrong with them because it doesn’t affect their job performance?
The real problem here is that you want to force the majority to pretend that a mental disorder is somehow not really a mental disorder.