No offense, but it’s obvious from this comment that you’ve never been in a boys locker room. =)
Powers &8^]
I have to stress that if I really thought this was just the fringe, I would not much care. There is an insane fringe on the edge of EVERY issue, and if you backed off every issue because of the nutbars on its fringe, you couldn’t support anything at all.
But I’m sorry, it’s not just fringe nuts. No, it’s not most people, but these sorts of things are rapidly becoming mainstream thought in this movement.
“Trans women are women” logically means “woman” means nothing and that feminity and masculaity are nothing more than lists of regressive stereotypes, and yet that mantra IS the mantra of the movement. Hell, trans people who speak up and say “well, now, let’s be clear, I do get the fact that physically I’m not the sex I present as, so…” are themselves being shouted down online. Sure, it’s the Internet, and social media is as toxic as hell, but the growth of this position is very, very rapid and it’s cheerfully occupying the mainstream where it can.
No opposition is permitted, even to argue about the details, as the title of this thread demonstrates; J.K. Rowling didn’t come out and say transpeople shouldn’t have legal rights or should be sent to prison. Her first move was to say sex is a real thing, and she started getting death threats. Then she reiterated it was a real thing and mainstream publications started calling her a transphobe. A major bookseller in Canada publically expressed “Disappointment” in her - for, remember, saying that biological sex is a thing that exists. I’d say that’s utterly insane, but it’s not if they’re just afraid of being on the wrong side of a witch hunt.
Because everyone’s comfort needs to be taken into account, not just one person. And parents in this situation aren’t just worried about the one special male who is allowed to shower with the girls, because maybe that one special male isn’t physically intimidating. Maybe they know this kid has always been effeminate. I think it is fair to say parents in this situation are almost always worried about the next shoe to drop. Like the males who are physically intimidating who “come out” as women and feel entitled to the same treatment as the first kid. Folks are imagining their 16-year-old daughter being forced to shower with 16-year-old males who are fully intact males and virtually indistinguishable from your average 16-year-old male except that they are cunning enough to claim they are girls. Even the most sex-positive hippy-dippiest parents would find this imagery concerning.
The folks who don’t see why this is a big deal always think that males identifying as girls will be a teeny tiny population–that it will only ever be one trans girl in the school so worrying about the next shoe to drop is silly. They never think you might have three or four males who say they are women just to fuck with everyone. Cuz, you know, it’s not like teenaged boys ever fuck with anyone, right?
If we don’t come up with some screening criteria, then it really isn’t unreasonable to worry about something like this.
Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with letting a male-bodied person shower with the girls (even with intact genitalia) as long as the locker room has a private shower and as long as the person’s dysphoria has been documented by psychologist/medical professionals for a very long time and the person had been presenting as female for quite some time. I wouldn’t be OK with letting males into the girls locker room just by uttering the words “I am a woman”, though. I don’t think most parents would. I think it’s politically foolish to act like those parents are all hate-mongers who just don’t want to get with the times.
I think people think it’s necessary for transwomen to dress with women because men will brutalize them if they try to go into the men’s locker room. Because men are dangerous animals, apparently, who become violent monsters at the sight of someone wearing feminine clothing in their locker room. Not this occurs not just in seedy hole-in-the-wall locker rooms that cater to a bad element. But in men’s locker rooms everywhere.
Notice how we never talk about transmen being killed or attacked in women’s locker rooms. All the violence is happening in the men’s room. But women who get ones who get called “Karens” for the crime of having a hostile look on their faces. The abusive men just get to keep on abusing, and no one even makes up a meme.
Right, because it implies that the other side of the issue is “sex is not real” rather than “let’s try to remember that not every woman has female genitalia.”
Just saying “sex is real” is not controversial. Saying it as a rebuttal to someone talking about trans rights is.
Powers &8^]
I’m not really exposed to all the hatefulness out there, so I think maybe you are right. Or at least more right than I am.
I admire your strength. Keep fighting the good fight.
I’ve been following this thread since the beginning.
I’ve been seeing mostly men (except for a few notable exceptions) dismissing and discounting women’s objections to gender ideology. Same old. same old.
I wonder if those who are so adamant about insisting that gender ideology doesn’t actually need to make sense, believers just want to live in peace think what’s the harm?.
Google Joanna Olson Kennedy. She’s a gender doctor in California. She has done elective mastectomies on many young women. According to her, the average age is 17.9. According to a video on youtube from last year, the breakdown of female born children under 18 she has performed this surgery on is as follows: 2 were 13 years old, 5 were 14. 9 were 15, 9 were 16 and 8 were 17. An equal number were a least 18. Maybe all these children are really and truly trans and they’ll get to 25 years old and they’ll think, yep yep, 14 year old me was exactly right. Or maybe they’ll end up on the reddit detrans sub. Asking why doctors did what they asked because they were teenagers for Christ’s sake.
I’m not aware of any medical authority that recommends surgical intervention to confirm gender before age 16. The usual treatment at that age is hormone blocking, which would naturally keep breast size minimal. Are you sure those are mastectomies and not breast reductions?
Powers &8^]
According to this source, some surgeons will perform top surgery for patients younger than 18 with parental consent:
Top surgery and chest surgery are euphemisms for double mastectomies - not breast reductions.
Cancer drugs given to children to stop the production of sex hormones are not benign either.
Counting people in a message board thread is hardly useful. Per the above poll, only 40% of women support bathroom restriction bills, vs 51% of men.
What do you mean by hardly useful? Do you think my observations about this thread are inaccurate?
Whether they’re accurate or not is irrelevant. As with race and sexuality, women (and younger people*) are, on average, more accepting.
*And we saw movement on race and sexuality as grandma and grandpa took their bigotry to the grave. Current polling is consistent with a similar shift over time.
Women are socialised to be kinder and more inclusive than men, even at our own expense, so that is hardly surprising.
What I find interesting is how so many women have the same story: we supported the trans rights movement until we looked into the subject more closely. Were there people who similarly supported gay marriage until they educated themselves on the subject and then changed their minds?
(Imagine if gay marriage supporters had demanded we stop using the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ because they are offensive to gay people and call them ‘breadwinner’ and ‘homemaker’ instead. I bet that would have gone down well.)
ETA: That was supposed to be a reply to @Ruken, don’t know how to change it now.
Not any more:
I often see people asserting that surgery is never done on children and that puberty blockers are a harmless pause button. I wonder how the results of polls like that would change if people knew that surgery is being done on children and the effects of drugs which halt the production of sex hormones have not been proven to be harmless.
New data, thank you. It will be interesting to see if that’s a trend or a blip.
I wouldn’t read too much into these statistics. I suspect a big reason more men that women support bathroom restrictions is that conservatism is generally higher in this group. A chunk of this population is automatically resistant to any change to the status quo, especially for LGBT.
I would be curious to see how things breakdown by sex within political affiliation.
I think people are finding out and opinions are changing: