No, I am saying that a random group of political activists are not uniquely qualified to determine which is right or wrong, which better or worse. If they want to change other people’s beliefs, they should have to put in the work to show why they are correct, not unilaterally declare all other beliefs bigoted in order to try and suppress them.
They have, that you disagree is a you problem, not a they problem.
They most certainly have done so. In great detail and repeatedly over the course of many years.
This is nothing like Joe Schmo saying, “I believe X just cuz.”
ETA: What @crowmanyclouds said more succinctly.
There’s also the issue of why is it the bigots who are supposed to be treated as infallible, while the opinions of their victims don’t matter? This entire argument is disingenuous, given how only one side of the dispute is supposed to be given such baseless deference.
And to put a cherry on top,
There are still people that think that;
Black people are inherently mentally inferior.
Gay people are an abomination.
Jews are sub-humans who rule the world.
But we certainly wouldn’t want to unilaterally declare any of those beliefs bigoted in order to try and suppress them. We clearly just haven’t put in enough work to show why they are not correct.
Another clear-sighted and compassionate post cutting through the pernicious propaganda. Kudos, DT.
Evidently they have not, since the majority of people don’t agree with them.
And like propaganda, appeals to emotion and various logical fallacies, calling something bigoted does nothing to prove you are correct. I guess it is an appeal to emotion, in fact. I dislike being manipulated in this way.
No one is saying they should be. I have no idea why you even think that. They should equally be required to demonstrate the correctness of their beliefs. However, if you are the one trying to change laws and society, the onus is on you to show why the change would be a good thing, with more benefits than harms.
An absurd argument that would justify literally every popular mistake or evil that’s ever existed. Reality is what it is regardless of what the majority think.
But we’ve seen in this very thread that folks can’t even see what the real problem is.
I.E. The problem isn’t trans women in toilets and locker rooms, it’s the safety of those spaces, in general, for everyone. And, curiously, we aren’t talking about changing that, we’re only talking about those evil trans folks. Ya know, people that share your gender might also want to bad things to you too!
And most of us should be able to remember when the claim was that non-heterosexuals were going take advantage of same gender spaces for their sexual kicks.
I’m not @crowmanyclouds , but in general, yes. In the particular case of public restrooms, if you put just a little effort into make the stalls more private, there’s really no issue with making them gender neutral. And frankly, there are a lot of places where I’m afraid to use the public restroom (because the men who are predators are NOT deterred by a sign on the door, and if you are willing to rape, you are willing to use the wrong restroom) and I’d be okay using it if my husband could come in with me.
Those private spaces like a woman’s-only book club i don’t really care about.
How about if trans women are their own category. A category that is not especially dangerous to cis women, and that is at higher risk of assault from cis men than cis women are? There aren’t enough of them to build them their own bathrooms. So which bathroom should they use? Common sense says we are all safer if they use the ladies rooms.
At this point i want to repeat this post, and maybe sharpen the point a little.
If you are a cis woman who has been made uncomfortable by a trans woman in your public restroom, then let’s talk about your experience and how to make the world more comfortable for everyone. Heck, if you are a man and want to talk about the experience your wife or daughter or friend had, sure, let’s talk. But if you are talking about a hypothetical cis woman who is afraid of a hypothetical trans woman who is oh so scary, then i think you are making a lot of unwarranted assumptions.
Because trans women aren’t just men in skirts. I’ve met a lot of trans women, and I’ve never met one who gave off that scary vibe that a significant minority of men give off. And i think this whole “we need to make women’s spaces safe” argument has been made up because it sounds plausible to people who’ve never actually experienced the problems it is supposed to solve.
I do find the idea that some rapist/murderer is going to be deterred by a rule saying they aren’t allowed in a bathroom to be rather silly. It’s almost as if such rules weren’t actually aimed at people like that…
I believe it’s part of a trend I have seen in other terms in recent discourse, of distinguishing modifier from noun when referring to classes or groupings of people. In that approach to language you format it as “trans [space] woman” so it is clear it means a woman, no debate about being a woman, who happens to be trans. I have noticed myself using the two formats at various times, and would defer at any given time to those directly alluded if asked to use one or the other.
That sort of presumes harms, and so if that’s going to be required then the side resisting the change should show what’s the harm – Actual harm, not mere discomfort. Because by and large the opposition to trans inclusion keeps sounding to me as a list of hypotheticals and what-if far-outlier worst-case scenarios (when not outright derogatory propaganda) mainly motivated by the discomfort at an established order of roles and identities no longer being presumed. While trans people DO face discrimination and hostility to the point of family abandonment and deadly assault. So, to me it’s kind of self-evident what position prevents greater harm.
I have some time and energy this morning, so i will try to make this case, for your personal benefit. (Because it’s impossible to make any case for all people everywhere.)
First, “men” and “women” are arbitrary categories we have constructed to approximate our biology. Our actual biology isn’t binary. We all start out as “female” and some of us are masculinized in utero and during puberty, mostly by exposure to sex hormones, but that’s probably not the full story. And that’s a process that doesn’t always work completely. So there are people who have xy chromosomes who are indistinguishable from xx women without a genetic test. There are people who are born hermaphroditic, with both a penis and a vagina. There are people who have full beards and heavy muscles who also have ovaries and a working uterus. And the brain is one of the many organs that can be masculinized (or not) during fetal development. Brain development is less biased towards the binary extremes than gonad development, but there are significant average differences between the sexes. And many (not all) people have a strong internal sense of what their gender is, and that sense doesn’t always match their bodies.
Oh, and despite the fact that many trans people “transition”, that’s not the root of the word “trans” in this context. It means “across”, like trans fats, which are hydrogenated on both sides, not just on one side. (Fun fact: i understood the word “cis” as applied to gender the first time i heard it, because i remembered enough organic chemistry to know it meant “on the same side”.) Transgender people are people whose internal sense of gender is strongly opposed to their assigned sex at birth. Probably because their genitalia and their brain weren’t masculinized to the same degree. Some of them are in the closet, and no one will ever know. Some of them get doctors to adjust their bodies to match their brains. Some of them make other choices. Cisgender people have an internal sense of gender that is “on the same side” as their bodies’ most prominent sexual characteristics.
There are some situations, mostly medical, where we need to keep track of the full panoply of sex-related details. The doctor doing your colonoscopy needs to know whether you currently have a uterus and also whether you ever had a uterus. But for most situations, rounding everyone to “male” or “female” is good enough.
The question then comes up, how should we “round” the people who aren’t clearly in one category or the other? Frankly, the right answer depends on the situation and on the person doing the categorizing. Do you want to make babies? Have wild sexy fun times without making babies? Talk about your shared lived experiences? Each person will have to decide based on their own criteria whether another person will be suitable.
But sometimes we need to make collective decisions. Like who gets admitted to each public rest room. And again, the “right” answer is going to depend the situation. A person with testicles and male levels of testosterone probably shouldn’t be allowed to play professional women’s basketball, whatever their chromosomes or internal sense of self is. But a prepubescent child who has a penis but really feels like a girl and socializes exclusively with girls should probably be put on the girls team, if those teams are segregated by gender.
So what do we do with public bathrooms and public changing areas? Well, a good first step is to provide a little privacy. Stalls or curtains. Another good first step is for everyone to recognize that sex isn’t binary, and there will be some outliers who ought to be allowed to use public restrooms and try on clothes.
With bathrooms, when there aren’t laws defining what “counts” as male or female, the default has been that people use the bathroom that matches what they look like and how they present themselves to others. That means that the hyper masculine trans man pictured above would use the men’s room. This is going to be imperfect, because there are people who don’t perfectly match the binary visual categories of “male” and “female”. And that’s not just trans people. There are plenty of cis people who are visually ambiguous as to gender. And also because looks are in the eye of the beholder, and some people will look at a person and think “male” while others think “female” and yet others will think “I’m not sure”, all looking at the same person. But if everyone remembers that sex isn’t completely binary, we can make this custom work. As mentioned above, i personally prefer unisex public restrooms. But gendered rest rooms can work, too. And i know that many people prefer them, for a variety of reasons.
If you think the burden of proof is on people who want to change the law, then people who want to regulate “birth sex” for restrooms have a pretty damn hard case to make, frankly.
Great post.
As to the pernicious propaganda-driven idea that this is all new and different and transitory and wrong and non-conservative …
The biological reality has always been this way. Always. What is new-ish (~100 years) and different is our scientific knowledge of that biological reality.
So we can choose to have society wallow in the primitive ignorance of that biological reality, or we can choose to have society include this century-old knowledge in our daily behaviors. Even ardent reactionaries seem to like new inventions like cars, air conditioning, and the internet. Somehow they struggle more with these realities that are actually millennia older than cars and air conditioners.
It’s difficult for a thinking person to ascribe that behavior to anything other than willful ignorance.
In a case involving a transgender player on the San Jose State women’s volleyball team, “trans fear” involves other players believing that allowing that player’s participation is unfair and will cause injury. However the player in question isn’t all that tall/big in comparison to non-trans women’s volleyball players and it doesn’t seem like her “kills” are at especially high velocity.
It looks as though the federal lawsuit filed by volleyball players got rejected by a judge and the conference volleyball tournament went ahead as scheduled. San Jose State was defeated by Colorado State.
Hooray?
In sport I am totally on board with testing and barring people from participating in women’s sports based on biological criteria.
Back in the 1970s we had Renee Richards. Richards transitioned at about 40 years of age. Had been a good (amateur) player as a man. But starting to play at age 40+ as a woman was ridiculous. Richards had already accrued the biological advantages of being a man, those didn’t dissipate with her transition. Richards had already had the opportunity to compete in sports as a man. She didn’t deserve a second bite at the apple at age 40+. But some people thought she deserved it. She didn’t, she shouldn’t have been allowed to compete at all.
Collectively, biologically, men and women are unequally yoked. Women don’t develop the size and strength of men at puberty due to testosterone. On the other hand, women are more necessary for reproduction than men are. It’s not equal, it will never be equal. In some societal ways, men can be disadvantaged. I’m a man and recognize that. But the genders are unequally yoked and complementary all the same.
So I allow that safe spaces for women are a part of the deal. Women’s sports is part of that safe space deal. That means that governing bodies get to decide who qualifies. All competitive sports are subject to other drug tests at this point, I don’t want sports to come down to who has the best drug cocktail. So the qualification aspect has multiple necessary components.
Personally, i kinda think there should be an “open” category where anyone can use any drugs they want.
Actually a good idea!