I don’t think it’s this bad. I think JKR wasn’t nearly careful enough to avoid triggering words and language that many trans people find hateful. But I think a carefully crafted argument could be made that would earn civil, if still disagreeing, responses (with the typical threats and nonsense from random assholes that are ubiquitous for all sides of any fraught issue) from trans activists and allies (and for the record, JKR got some of these anyway - I linked to at least one earlier). Considering those missteps, I think JKR is the wrong focal point of the trans skeptical POV.
Because if someone is passing as female, this is no problem to address. If your form isn’t triggering, then of course you should be able to pee in the restroom without anyone bothering you.
If someone’s form is triggering, then they need to be prepared for questioning. I don’t think the average female-presenting transwoman is going to be triggering to most women in the absence of triggering behavior (like literal dick-waving). And I’m saying that I don’t support a woman who’d block a transwoman who meets the “female-presenting” condition from using the toilet. But a male-presenting glitterbutch? Yes, they might need to be prepared for some questioning and some blocking. Since such a person can use the men’s restroom without violence in 99.9% of cases, this seems only fair.
I wasn’t characterizing all of your posts in this thread. I’m only pointing out that you’re only asking me about restrooms, despite the fact I’ve been saying all along that I think restrooms are a big nothingburger. I’m wondering why are you only asking about restrooms and not the eleventy-billion other things we’ve talked about that I don’t think are nothingburgers. It’s OK if you don’t want to answer the question, but I don’t think the question is uncalled for.
I have to admit what you intend as a statement of blinding obviousness reads as an inherent contradiction to me. Transmen were assigned female at birth, but they are no longer female; they are male. That’s what being trans means, isn’t it?
But perhaps you can help clarify if you answer my question from the post to which you responded (“In what way? Genetically?”).
Powers &8^]
I googled glitter beard, since I’d never heard of that before reading the article @monstro linked to, but I didn’t find anything about trans people - only a bunch of articles about how to make your beard glitter. What do glitter beards have to do with trans people?
Google “glitterbutch.” That seems to have a much stronger nexus with the nonbinary gender identity.
A few minutes of searching didn’t find me much aside from a few individuals who use that, or a variation, as their user names. But thanks - I’ll look deeper when I’m able.
This article indicates that it’s a term used by those for whom glittery decoration is an integral part of their queer identities.
Powers &8^]
This is a global issue. I know this thread was started because of JKR, but you have to look beyond her and see the larger context. The response to JKR is just a tip of the iceberg.
Just came across this story. The first quote you come to sums up the “all or nothing” sentiment I’m talking about it.
As more and more people realize that this hardline is being advanced by trans activists, support for them can only go in one direction and that’s down.
“Female” is a set of physical characteristics. It is not something 99.9% of female humans are “assigned,” it’s just what they physically are. Trans men remain female, to varying degrees.
I don’t think that the distinctions being made between “female/male” and “woman/man” are fundamental or commonly accepted.
Whatever “female” means, “woman” means “female human.”
Similarly, whatever “male” means, “man” means “male human.”
So if trans women are women, they are also female. And if trans men are men, then they’re also male.
Just like we have had to get used to the terms “cisgender man” and “cisgender woman,” we might also have to get used to specifying “biologically” or “genetically” or “anatomically” or “assigned at birth” man or woman to talk about a person with a certain set of genes or body parts.
We have made all kinds of accommodations in language to address matters of social inequities. Is this one significantly different?
I made a post a while ago asking what gender really means in the current conversation. I can’t say I yet have a thorough understanding of it, but it seems very important to the trans community.
We no longer accept it when someone tried to distinguish between a person’s “real” offspring as opposed to adopted offspring. It makes sense to me that a trans woman would similarly object to being excluded by term “real woman.”
And I have to admit, I don’t care about sports games and don’t consider them important. They’re recreational activities. So while it is a bit of a curiosity to consider how men’s and women’s sports will accommodate transgenderism, they should follow societal values, not define them.
So what’s considered fair and just in society as a whole should apply to recreational activities as well, but what’s easiest for organizing games shouldn’t define what’s fair and just.
That’s what it used to mean, but nowadays in means someone who ‘feels like a man’, whatever that means to them, and whether or not they are (yet) making any effort to look or act like a man. Sex is now defined as a subjective mental state, and everyone else is supposed to adjust their perceptions accordingly or be guilty of a thought crime.
This is kind of off topic, but I am increasingly disillusioned with the idea that changing the language we use can actually address social inequities, or anything else. There’s two problems with this idea:
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Thought drives language, not the other way around. We see this with the euphemism treadmill, as the polite term of yesterday becomes unacceptable today. Eg the replacement of ‘idiot’ and ‘moron’ (originally scientific terms) with ‘mentally retarded’, and then the replacement of that with the vague ‘special needs’. Only when the concept described is no longer stigmatised can this process end.
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Social pressure can keep people quiet but it doesn’t change their minds - or their votes. If you make it unacceptable to disagree publicly, then you make it impossible to try and persuade people who don’t agree, and impossible to know how many of them there are - until the ‘wrong’ candidate unexpectedly wins an election.
Progressives are going to have to accept that, outside of the internet, mainstream society perceives everyone with penises and other markers of a Y chromosome as male-bodied. And everyone with vaginas are female. Attempts to police language in the service of obscuring biological truth only comes across as totalitarian and sinister.
If someone is still packing the equipment used to impregnate another person, it’s a complete joke to be referring them as female. The more you try to foist absurdities into people’s heads, the more you challenge their acceptance of the whole gender ideology enterprise. It’s exactly why I’ve decided not go along with “cis woman” anymore. The language policing is too much.
Society can change and it can change fast. Less than 30 years ago, the best we could do for gay people was “don’t ask don’t tell.” It’s very different now and not just inside the Internet. Mainstream society can be quite accommodating. Already, a transgender people can go out in many public settings and be treated as the gender they present as. In casual social transactions no one thinks about it has to think about what “equipment they’re packing.”
Certainly society has a lot of things to figure out, but grim declarations about how things will always be in the real world ring pretty hollow to me, because society has already shown a great capacity for change.
Meanwhile, I don’t know what the point is of telling a transgender man “no matter what you do or say, if you have the equipment to impregnate a woman, you are male.” As if that’s preserving some kind of eternal truth. “Male” is just a word and words change over time. They’re not eternal.
So what? None of this changes the importance of using terminology that doesn’t needlessly obscure biological truth. Calling trans women “females” rather than “males” robs us of the ability to coherently talk about this group’s membership in a particular sex class.
We should only get rid of “male” when it stops being a useful term when describing sex classes. Being able to impregnate someone is a function of the male sex class. As long as reproduction is a facet of our lives, we will need language that succinctly and clearly conveys who plays which role in propagating the species. Females, by definition, do not impregnate.
There is nothing particularly important about the word “male” with respect to biology that needs to be “preserved.” Science changes terminology as needed and changing terminology doesn’t “obscure” anything. Science can easily use “anatomically male” or “biologically male”!or “genetically male.” That doesn’t upset or obscure science at all.
So this is what is happening now:
Again, I can’t emphasize enough the effect this is having on women’s views towards gender ideology. It’s affecting women across all political and socioeconomic lines, around the world.
I’ve decided to boycott Reddit.
I took a look at r/PCOS, and I see that it has a mod announcement that "Women with PCOS are welcome here. Men with PCOS are welcome here. Non-binary people with PCOS are welcome here. "
It’s hard for me to object to that. It’s a sub for people dealing with PCOS. Declaring that if you have PCOS you must therefore also identify as a woman seems aggressively unhelpful to those who have the condition.
It’s the same thing as “people who menstruate” - I don’t feel erased as a woman if I acknowledge that there are some people who don’t identify or live as women who also have to deal with certain issues of a biologically female body.