OT, but isn’t that kind of dangerous? I mean, I appreciate that you’re calling him “pretty tame”, but Sigfried & Roy thought theirs was tame too.
What kind of tiger is there that can be safely walked on a leash?
What’s the difference between supporting the right of transgender women with penises to use the lady’s room despite a woman’s preference not to have here there and supporting that same woman’s preference not to have a man with a penis in the same room by having a “women’s room” where men are expected not to go?
“God created cats so man would know the pleasure of petting a tiger.”
- Fernand Mery
I support the first because to do otherwise has been proven to risk serious harm to trans people; I have no preference or position on the second, since neither option causes any harm that I’m aware of.
I keep going back and forth on this but I cannot tell if the transgender bathroom issue is more akin to gay marriage 2004 or gay marriage 2008.
In 2004, Rove and co. used wedge issues like gay marriage to motivate conservatives to the polls. At that point, gay marriage had been on a losing streak ever since people tried to win at the ballot. It was a safe issue for Bush because the public was mostly on his side even though liberals were generally against him, but sympathetic to that cause.
By 2008, gay marriage was close to winning its first ballot initiative (2009 Vermont) but the side had been bolstered by a few court case wins. It was still a wedge issue, but getting smaller and smaller and the public were generally wary of more bans to a right everyone feel would soon be expanded. Only the true believers fought on after 2008, and by the next election I think it mostly ceased to be a winning issue for conservatives.
These transgender bathroom bills feel like 2008. The arguments against it is silly now and long past the point where any opponent can’t demolish it with a few easy examples. But because of the newness of these bills, I feel a little like 2004, its still a wedge issue capable of generating enormous passion against it from the religious and “family” side. I’m absolutely convinced though that by 2020 it will cease to be a winning issue for conservatives, but right now I don’t know what to think.
If the Dems have some kind of metrics to measure public perception of this issue, I hope they take a good long comparison of this with gay marriage. I’m a supporter of transgender rights, but it is definitely not worth losing the election over. Once Dems secure the presidency and hopefully Congress, then we can push the remnants of opposition away with executive orders and such
Then why does the trans-rights crowd never ever respond to the repeated point about locker rooms? They only want to talk about bathrooms that have private stalls. What about locker rooms and group showers with no privacy curtains?
Great question!
We can’t really hash this out, because I don’t really buy into the categories “trans people” or “cis people”. I will use them in some contexts to be polite, but when it gets right down to the nitty gritty I don’t believe in it.
I don’t fear you (collectively). I feel *pity *for you (collectively). And I feel you (collectively) have been poorly served by a societal decision to turn away from seeing your (collective) issues through a psychological/psychiatric framework.
P.S. If I’m so “transphobic”, why have I watched, and enjoyed, every episode of Amazon’s transparent? (And yes, I did take the radical feminists’ side in that debate at the music festival, which got a very fair and even treatment.)
With significantly less risk. 
I’ve seen no new stories about, nor expect to see, a bunch of trans people parading themselves naked in those places. Do you not get that many (if not most) are not even close to comfortable with doing that?
No, not really. Unless the woman has x-ray vision or is psychic, she’s unlikely even to know she’s in the same room with a trans person unless she knows them personally, and if she does, she knows that trans person thinks of him/herself as being of the same sex.
I’m not even sure what you’re saying here. Do you mean that they don’t really feel like the opposite sex? Or that it’s just some sort of delusion? Or what? Serious question, I’m not being disingenuous.
Dude, you’re digging a deeeep hole with that one.
This was not addressed to me, but FWIW, I myself am unsure that the concept of “gender identity” exists altogether, and if it does, how any person might know what their gender identity is.
In a bit more detail, I’m not sure that there is an inherent sense of gender, as opposed to a knowledge (similar to sense of being a given height or nationality etc.) and if there is one, how any individual person might know what the female or male gender identity is, so as to know which they have.
You wanna know what the political fallout will be? Hell, I’ll tell you what I expect the social fallout to be: we all realize the stupidity of communal bathrooms and fucking stop making them. Or at least we design them differently: I can picture a communal sink area but separate stalls with full doors for relieving oneself as a possible outcome as well.
Then educate yourself.
I used to be unsure as to whether or not Cincinnati really existed; I had never actually seen the place with my own eyes, and had never met anyone from there. I just assumed that it was fictitious, and really, it probably did not exist altogether.
Then I looked into it, and found that it was a real place - the evidence of it’s existence was pretty overwhelming.
Safe is relative; he was semi-tame, but they’re never truly tame. You take a risk walking with them. He was an old tiger who had been led around by probably a thousand gawking tourists in his time. The reason my hand is on his rump is that the monks said it keeps him aware of your presence, so he doesn’t get surprised by the motion of you to the side. I don’t know…they work the tigers every day, so they must know.
Was it worth the risk to walk such a magnificent beast? I felt so. However, one of the older tiger cubs, about the size of a Labrador, lashed out me once while playing with a ball, prompting the caregivers to jump in. Thankfully I was alert and I jumped back really fast. My weapons master always said I had one of the fastest retreats in fencing that he’d ever seen…
I’ve looked into it a bit and not really found anything. I mean, there are a lot of empty declarations by people like yourself, but I’m talking about substantive. (FTR I’m aware of the various brain studies, but these don’t address the issue IMO.)
Do you also have transgendered friends as well?
Yes, I think it is like anorexics who look in the mirror and see a fat person even though they are wasting away. Or like that guy who thinks he is a cat so he keeps getting plastic surgery to be more catlike.
I would endorse this. It is obviously less efficient but we have to do something and this seems like the best compromise.
I wish people who fear…excuse me, pity us would even do the damnest bit of legwork on an issue before they started typing on it. The “psychological/psychiatric framework” determined as far back as the 1960’s that the “cure” for being transgender was transition. This is hardly obscure knowledge, not only is it accessible via WPATH, the AMA, and numerous other medical organizations, I’ve covered it extensively here.
They tired counseling, they tried drugs, they tried electroshock, insulin shock, they even tried brain surgery. They put us in asylums, they took away our livelihoods and tried to kill the “ghost” inside us. And all of these treatments are ineffective at significant improvement in the quality of life of transgender people, barring counseling as part of a path towards transition.
Jesus F. Christ, don’t you think if there was something akin to a magic pill that would prevent us from facing loss of our spouses, families, careers, homes, churches, health, and everything else most of us would take it?! We want to risk throwing everything away because we want to wear heels and makeup? Holy shit, you must think we’re doing this for fun, or because we’ve decided to turn up our noses at the “right” solution, one which fits with your worldview.
Transphobes refuse to accept history and science, or even research it because they’re afraid it will tell them their notions are wrong. They have decided, sitting at home in their beanbag chairs, that almost all of the major medical bodies, almost all researchers in this field since Benjamin’s 1966 "The Transsexual Phenomenon, " are wrong. They have a PhD in FOX News, and that trumps everyone else who has actually worked in the field, or lived the life and walked the walk. It’s only “political correctness”, and not any evidence of it being the best path to treatment, which leads them thar’ trannies down this path. After all, “pray the gay away” worked, right? :smack:
And my racist grandfather liked Sammy Davis Junior, because he was one of those “good, polite ni**ers.” He still didn’t think he should be allowed to vote, or buy a house in his neighborhood.
Sorry if I’m not being completely articulate…but then again I seldom am. 
I should have said ‘herself’ instead of ‘him/herself’ in #208 above. It shows a certain bias in me, though I fancy myself at least somewhat objective. I’m a straight cis guy, so I plainly can’t quite see things as trans people do. The entire issue just offends an inherent (or learned) sense of fairness in me, especially when the demagogues start trying to infringe on Constitutional rights.
And for Fotheringay-Phipps, I suggest you read the cite I posted in #180. You might gain a little insight into what it’s like to be trans. SlackerInc too, for that matter.
I will ignore your snark and answer with sincerity. One of my best friends in college had a father who declared himself to have become a woman and thereafter was referred to by my friend as his “parent”. I only met his parent a couple of times as he lived a ways away.
And then just the other day, a 13 year old relative declared on social media that she, er, he was a trans boy with a new name, after having weeks earlier cut her hair short and saying she was bisexual. I will be curious to see what s/he has settled on five or ten years hence.
Republicans are trying to use it as a wedge issue. It isn’t working to sway any fence sitting votes their way, but it may get the base to the polls even if they don’t care for Trump. (but the base likes Trump, so it won’t matter)
Una, thanks for the cookie cutter response, but if you paid the slightest attention to my comments you would have noted that I stood up before hundreds of people and TV cameras to argue for gay rights. So even if you didn’t know I am an atheist, that should have clued you into my not being so much into “praying the gay away”. My comment (also in this thread) speaking up for Medicaid expansion, should have clued you in to the fact that I I’m not a Fox News conservative. In fact, I am a strongly pro-Obama Democrat, albeit one who disagrees with him on this issue.
As for your litany of unfortunate attempts at treatment that were attempted in the 1960s, a lot of that medieval shit was used to battle depression and other psychiatric problems back then as well. Does that mean they should have stopped looking for new and better treatments? For that matter, if something was unable to be cured in the 1960s, why does that mean it can never be cured, regardless of what type of affliction it is? Should we have stopped looking for treatments for cancer at that time?