May I wish you a happy cake day? I’m glad you’ve been here all those years~how about 21 more?
No shit, Sherlock
I’m not sure what you mean by this, but it sounds plausible. Yes, there are underlying biological facts that push people to adopt one gender or another.
No shit, Sherlock
And here’s where you jump into a rabbit hole. People can transition socially or physically, and rarely do those at the same time. And it’s not toxic at all. It’s the opposite of toxic, it is affirming and can be life saving. Yes, in some cases, people make bad decisions about transitioning. People sometimes make bad decisions about careers, and spouses, and eating, too. That doesn’t mean we don’t let people make important decisions about their lives.
And who the hell is hurt when someone else transitions? I mean, yeah, it can take the parents a while to get used to the idea. Much like learning your kid is gay. But it doesn’t actually harm your loved ones to learn the truth about you.
Gender non-conforming people generally don’t transition at all. Sometimes they identify as non-binary and let others know that. Mostly they just… don’t conform to the expectations about the gender they still identify with. I’m a gender non-conforming woman. I was assigned female at birth, i check “female” on the forms, and most people refer to me as “she”. Heck, I’ve taken the name “puzzle gal” on this website. But i haven’t worn a skirt in years, and I’m pretty butch in a lot of other ways.
I am not a trans man. I’m comfortable in my female skin, and so long as you allow me not to conform to the aspects of femininity that I’m not comfortable with, I’m perfectly okay with you seeing me as a woman. That makes me fundamentally different from a trans man. That’s a really important difference. Like, a deeply critically important difference.
Recognizing the essential femininity of trans women, and the masculinity of trans men isn’t about pretending. It’s about recognizing who and what they really are. And acknowledging their existence and the validity of their experience isn’t “hurting” other people. It’s basic human decency.
The only people it hurts is stupid old white men and sick bigots and it only hurts them in their pride, their feefees and their privilege. To which I can only reply loudly,
Thanks. I certainly intend it!
Sometimes “human” is a courtesy title. But I like your way of saying it better.
A trans woman I know told me that she is delaying even the hormonal part of transitioning because she is intending on the surgical part as well. She’s saving up a lot of money because she’s seen too many botched jobs. That was more than five years ago and she’s still saving.
A trans woman i know said that she shopped extensively to find a plastic surgeon who took her insurance, but the only ones she found had bad reviews. So she’s paying cash. Fortunately, she can afford it.
It’s hard for me to understand how some of you are ignoring the indisputable fact that legalizing same-sex marriage created untold numbers of new gay people.
/s
My long-standing pithy position on all of this is: human sexuality isn’t simple. Social conservatives, OTOH, are.
This is exactly how I feel.
Seconding all of that (except, obviously, for the bit about the specific choice of online name.)
I’m female. I’m female if I’m wearing a dress – I do own one. I’m female if I’m wearing cargo pants and tshirt and boots, all of them labeled “men’s”, which is a whole lot more likely to be what I’m wearing. I’m female if I’m cooking, and I’m female if I’m changing the oil on the tractor, and I’m female the whole time I’m running the farm.
And I’ve been sure all along that I’m female, even when I was six and being asked why I walked “like a boy”. And it has nothing to do with the appearance of my genitals, because when I was asked that I didn’t yet know that boys had different genitals. (It was the 1950’s, and I had no brothers.)
So I was confused at first about trans people – and then it occured to me: if I can be so sure that I’m female no matter what I’m wearing and no matter what I’m doing: why can’t somebody else be equally sure that they’re female (or male, or other) no matter what portions of their body look like?
This. Just this.
And stop using the either/or principal where it doesn’t apply. That damned framework of thinking does a whole lot of damage.
Whereas I’ve never had a strong female identity, and if i were 20, I’d probably identify as non-binary. So i was, maybe, even more puzzled by trans people. But i recognize that people are diverse. My husband and my daughter both have a strong gender identity (he’s male, she’s female). And i see the discomfort it causes real, flesh and blood people, to be misgendered. Because I’ve interacted with trans people, and i have some small amount of empathy. It doesn’t take a lot of empathy.
OK, let me connect the dots for you here.
People make the argument “nobody would ever go through transition unless it was a sign of real distress or dysphoria because it’s so hard and terrible. The social opprobium is huge, there’s painful surgeries involved, it’s just a terrible process.”
If the social opprobium has gone down to the extent that people can contemplate just fake-transitioning for a laugh or to save $1000 and it is in fact easy - just a matter of filling out a few forms - then why wouldn’t an athlete do it for gain? Obviously as an athlete you’d have to dope a bit and say the right words but athletes do dope and say words if it gets them what they want.
The fact that there’s been such a meltdown here over the proposition “people can lie, therefore this person could be lying about this” is really troubling.
Y’all should take a leaf out of Debbie Hayton’s book. She has no problem with “yes, I’m a transwoman - and also that means I’m actually a man.” That’s the actually mentally healthy way of dealing with gender dysphoria.
And that really is my last word on the subject. Feel free to continue to talk about what a dumbass I am amongst yourselves.
Has dumbass come up? I mean, dumbassery can be cured. You’re toxic. And hateful. A bigot. Useless. All permanent conditions.
What gain?
As has been noted repeatedly the social damage associated with transitioning, even fake transitioning if you will, are very far from trivial. Very few people are a Caitlyn Jenner who can afford to insulate themselves financially and even for them the consequences are not nothing. By and large women’s sports are not a Golden Ticket to riches. A handful get rich, a double handful make decent money. But nothing compared to male sports. And women’s swimming or track&field? Forget it. And it’s not like some hypothetical cheater pretending to be trans is going to get social status for gaming the system either.
For the vast majority of humanity the pros will not come close to outweighing the cons of upending your life.
I have become convinced that everyone who is truly worried about men transitioning for the purpose of winning athletic competitions are simply projecting their own dishonesty onto others. It’s something that they would do, so they are sure that that’s what others would do as well.
Same with those who think that men are just transitioning into women for the purpose of sneaking a peak in the women’s locker room.
Their obsession with the genitals of other people is quite telling.
As I said before:
If you don’t want a person of type X doing Y, then there are straightforward ways to get that done:
Support legislators that legislation that bans X from doing Y (of course the devil will be in the details of that legislation).
Support activities and actions that discourage X from doing Y. (For example, make it so Lia and people like her no longer want to participate in swimming. Perhaps this involves booing/protesting, public shunning/shaming. etc)
Support activities and actions that target those who enable X to do Y. (For example, withdrawing donations to the ADs that let X do Y., boycotting products that use X in advertising, etc)
So you can use, legal, social, or financial methods to stop X from doing Y.
If you want to use shaming as your tool of choice, then do it. Just don’t act surprised when you get shamed in return by those who disagree with you
Right. Because trans female athletes are just raking in the fame and fortune all over. It’s obviously the easiest path to success.
Most successful athletes are genetic freaks. Basketball players are weirdly tall. Swimmers have enormous feet. Football players weigh three times as much as normal humans. At a cellular level, some sports select for those with abnormally many fast twitch muscle cells.
Do we all pile on them and talk about how unfair it is that they have those unfair advantages? No. But be a girl born with an extra source of testosterone and the whole world despises you. Yeah, that’s a position lots of people want to be in.
Now now, TERFS aren’t all old white men, so let’s not get gendered in our assumptions to the many rainbow flavors of bigoted shitstains!
(not taking a mean-spirited potshot at you @SmartAleq - just want to be clear that sadly, all of the various flavors of humanity can find ways to be shitty)
Okay, back to the actual Pitting. In the ATMB thread that spawned this one, I made it clear that I felt that the OP of Apissdate and the links used were horrible, but didn’t rise to the level of hate speech IMHO (be clear, everyone draws the line differently).
Being a free nation, I fully respect your right to agree. But hey, I also agree that you should be shunned like the plague - your statements cannot be taken to mean much of anything past hate. You keep using examples that presuppose that EVERY trans person it lying. You dress it up in words like ‘courtesy titles’ and the like, but your every defense boils down to thinking that at some level its a scam to get ahead.
Sure, there are people who spend every day in that mindset, including former presidents, but if the number of them were as high as mentioned, we’d be Mad Maxxing it already. And the fact that you specifically apply this mentality to trans persons without looking at the greater number of non-trans shitbags, well, once again, this thread is revealing more about you than any sort of deep unfairness in the sports world.
Aside from everything else wrong with this paragraph, which is a lot:
Has anybody else noticed that @Aspidistra has, in addition to insulting all trans people, insulted all athletes?
[checks forum] People who are not only obsessed with the possibility that others might cheat, but who assume that all others do cheat whenever they get the chance, are showing something unpleasant about their own thought processes.
Eh, I can believe someone would, say, commit tax fraud without planning or wanting to do it myself. But your larger point stands in regards to transitioning.