J K Rowling and the trans furore

[DemonTree]

@Banquet_Bear

This is what should be alarming you.

Who are you to tell me what my priorities should be? Changing the law affects everyone. If that change might harm me, and people like me, I want to be able to see evidence for and against, not have it dismissed out of hand the way people have been here:

@BigT

That is what I would argue. You might run into the occasional person who seems to present male but identify as female. But there will be so few of them that, even if they were faking, they can’t really be a threat–at least, no more a threat than any other woman could be. (The predator angle is the dumbest, as why couldn’t there be a cisgender lesbian predator?)

@Kimstu

• not requiring transgender women to physiologically transition somehow increases danger to women from male predators in women’s restrooms etc. (and what happened to not requiring gender-norm conformity in order to qualify as a “woman”?)

Those arguments AFAICT simply make no sense, and I don’t see anything wrong with criticizing the self-described “gender critical” activists who advocate them.

@Chronos

OK, set aside, for the moment, the question of whether transgenderism is “real” or not. Does it even matter? If someone tells me that they prefer to be referred to as “she”, is there any reason why I shouldn’t? Is there any reason I should care who’s in the bathroom stall next to me? If we can make a bunch of people happier with no negative consequences, then we should.

I’d like women to be able to talk about possible negative consequences publicly without being labelled transphobes and shouted down and told to shut up.

If we’re discussing what to do with transgender people in prisons, we should be taking both attacks on and attacks by transgender prisoners into account. Because putting a transwoman in a men’s jail is a pretty terrible idea, but so is allowing any man who says he’s a woman to live in a female jail. Ideally everyone would be safe in jail regardless of sex and gender, but we all know that isn’t going to happen. So why should women be expected to bear all the risk? - when it’s men who commit the crimes. A separate prison or unit for transgender prisoners would keep everyone safe.

And something else I noted from those articles: the figures only include prisoners who haven’t legally changed their gender. It’s impossible to get stats on attacks by transwomen and transmen who have a GRC, because they’re counted as their new gender. So we have no way to find out now if there is a significant risk or not, and if it is made easier to legally change gender, we won’t be able to find out whether crimes have increased as a result.