You should read their most recent post, the one right above yours.
And I’ll take this chance to facepalm myself - it was a right-wing bigot who came up with the idea of “menstruator” as a pejorative!
ETA: Heh, simulpost.
or more accurately “cis women between ~13 and ~50?, as well as trans men without bottom surgery in the same age range.” I’m not 100% sure menstruators is the best term, but I would imagine pads and tampon companies would like a term shorter than a paragraph.
Double post
Wait, I was under the impression that gender reassignment surgery is not typically something being done on children. And I don’t know what you mean by “irreversible” hormone treatment. People go on and off hormones all the time.
But to answer your question, I don’t think it is a big societal problem, no. I don’t think we’re in for an epidemic of teenage boys wanting to chop off their penises. I do think that if we made it easier for gender dysphoric kids to settle on an identity that works for them without a lot of parental pushback and freaking out, then it becomes less of an issue when some of those kids realize they aren’t dysphoric anymore (or if they realize that their dysphoria is one acquired from life experiences rather than a congenital condition).
That said, I’m not a parent. Perhaps if I had a child, I would probably care more.
Like I said, a full 30% of males.
So, when was the last time something the conservative right feared actually a widespread threat? WWII?
So rape isn’t a problem unless a full 30% of males are committing it?
Sticking your phone under a stall wall sounds to me like a way to end up with a smashed phone.
But yes, it’s possible to do that. It’s possible to do that even if there’s no one in the room but women. What stops it now?
It’s my understanding that those kinds of activities are illegal regardless of the perpetrator’s gender identity.
Hear-fucking-hear. As I’ve always said, a crucial component of dealing with both real/permanent and imagined/temporary transgender identification among adolescents is just to stop making such a big goddamned deal about gender identity and gender conformity in the first place.
If we keep telling kids that there’s only one right way to be a boy or girl, and that if they like stuff stereotypically associated with the other gender then they must be doing gender “wrong”, then naturally that’s going to create a huge buildup of child/adolescent anxiety about the perceived need to “fix” their gender.
Maybe in the future, if people manage to stop freaking out about the whole notion of transgender/genderqueer/nonbinary/etc. identity, we’ll have gender identity following some of the same social patterns that sexual orientation does these days. Perhaps a temporary exploration of transgender identity among some adolescents will become a recognized phenomenon, like the “lesbian until graduation” effect. As long as we don’t all have panicky meltdowns about it, and don’t rush into approving any serious surgery for minors whose transgender identity is not what the docs call “insistent, consistent and persistent”, what the hell difference does it make who identifies as a girl or a boy or neither?
Throwing an irrational conniption fit about gender issues is a surefire way to get many attention-seeking teens declaring themselves transgender just for the drama. And sorry, but JK Rowling explaining to the world at large how a particular piece of transgender-rights legislation scares her because she was sexually assaulted and abused several decades ago by her first husband (who AFAIK was an entirely “normal” cisgender heterosexual man with no connections to the transgender-rights movement whatsoever) counts as throwing an irrational conniption fit.
You might not mind, but to many other people, they see this whole trans issue as a charade which they are tired of putting up with.
Imagine if one of your coworkers says, “From now on, I identify as a giraffe, and you must refer to me as Mister Giraffe at all times.” You might humor him once or twice, but after a while, tire of it, or start to feel serious cognitive dissonance, and say, “OK, enough is enough. I’m done with this.”
…I’m skeptical of how this has been framed by the Times. The transphobia at the Times is pretty obvious to me and the transphobia in general in British media, even from the left-leaning media such as the Guardian is so wide-spread that the New York Times posted an article on it.
The Times article you cited is paywalled. But the gist of it can be found here on the Daily Fail. That article states:
Lets look at the information that the Daily Fail chose to omit. From the BBC:
So this isn’t as clear-cut as you make it out to be. The scandal here is that since 2010 there have been 124 sexual assaults. Not that some of those assaults were done by a person who may have identified as non-binary. Your priorities are all out of whack.
This is what should be alarming you.
I am not incensed by what she wrote. I find she makes some valid points. I am aware that she’s a professional writer, and being cautious accordingly.
The people I know who’ve transitioned did so in a lengthy process, with plenty of occasions to change their minds. That seems reasonable to me.
Uh, yes, of course, it’s possible for an individual cis woman to be offended by this term; I can imagine a sizeable proportion of them are. Even if it’s technically correct.
In some corners of the gay and lesbian community, the term for straights is “breeder”. It’s technically correct, but I’m sure many straight people would find it offensive.
I really think most of the views you are expressing are shared by Rowling.
She is also expressing fear of losing her “single sex spaces”.
That might be a tad irrational.
I think she is catching way too much flak for that.
I would question the giraffe on what it (and I would indeed be sure to refer to it as an “it,” as non-human animals tend not to care) is doing in an office acting like a human. And then I’d go from there.
If it does indeed prefer to identify as a giraffe, then okay, go find a zoo to hang out in, but don’t sit there at that computer typing and expect me to believe you really, deep down, identify as a giraffe and take it on good faith.
That sort of reasonable post might get you fired or cancelled yourself.
Well, that applies to a lot of other forms of bigotry as well. Many people who believe that heterosexuality is the only natural and normal human condition see the whole gay-rights issue as a “charade which they are tired of putting up with”. Many people who are convinced that they worship the one true god and all other religions are evil idolatry see the whole religious-freedom issue as a “charade which they are tired of putting up with”.
If somebody’s trying to tell somebody else that they shouldn’t have the right to express their own beliefs and identity in a way that isn’t harming anybody, they need to have a way better justification for that authoritarian claim than merely their own kneejerk inclination to regard the other person’s beliefs/identity as a “charade”.
[QUOTE=Velocity]
Imagine if one of your coworkers says, “From now on, I identify as a giraffe, and you must refer to me as Mister Giraffe at all times.”
[/QUOTE]
The profound stupidity of treating transgender identity in human beings as somehow equivalent to considering oneself a member of an entirely different biological species is a measure of just how thoroughly ignorant transphobia has become entrenched in our cultural discourse. (And misogyny as well, given that so many men would literally feel less threatened or alienated being identified as a member of a non-human species than as a human female.)
This should not need pointing out among educated people in the 21st century, but here goes anyway: Biologically, males and females of the species Homo sapiens are very much alike, and for about the first two months of fetal development they are anatomically indistinguishable. All it takes to turn the physiology of a developing fetus from female to male or vice versa is a relatively minor adjustment of the hormones they receive in utero. Even in fully developed adulthood, sex hormones or other hormone disruptors can massively change the secondary-sex characteristics of the human body.
This is why there are, relatively speaking, so many varieties of intersex humans, and why medical science in general accepts transgender identity as a scientifically plausible phenomenon: there can be a lot of overlap and cross-contamination between male and female patterns of development among humans, so having some statistically “abnormal” combination of biologically male and female characteristics is really not all that unusual or surprising.
Compare that reality to the absolute physical impossibility of a human having biological characteristics of a vastly different non-human species such as a giraffe. And you’ll realize why transgender identity is currently regarded as a scientifically plausible reality of human experience while “identifying as a giraffe” is considered a delusion.
Read post #37, and loosen your grip on those pearls.
Yes but we’re not at two months anymore.
You know who else is biologically similar? People of all races - indeed, a black man and white man are more physically similar than a white man and white woman. And yet we wouldn’t accept people going around claiming they are a different race than they really are, as Rachel Dolezal found out.
That sort of reasonable post might get you fired or cancelled yourself.
I don’t have a problem with pronouns, and I suspect that Rowling doesn’t either (at least not THAT much).
If someone wanted me to refer to them as a giraffe, it would strike me silly at first, but I’d probably get used to it. Because giving them the “giraffe treatment” would only require me to call them “Mister Giraffe”. I wouldn’t have to change how I see them.
I think many gender critical folks have a problem with the increasingly prevailing view that it isn’t enough to have enlightened pronoun usage or allow people to dress however they like. We are being told to revamp our entire concept of gender so that self-proclaimed idiosyncratic feelings take primacy over biology and socialization. Of course when you revamp anything that is as deeply entrenched as gender is, we can expect a full range of foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences. And given the history of women and men in terms of power relations, it isn’t that crazy to see how many of the negative consequences could disproportionately impact women.
I think a lot of the pushback comes from irrational fear and hatred. I just don’t think ALL of it is irrational hatred.