I agree with this. Without intending to be flippant, it reminds me of the voter-fraud “issue,” in that there really have been few or no cases of actual voter fraud–and the attempts to “solve the problem” of supposed voter-fraud are actually about something else entirely (suppressing the votes of ‘undesirable’ demographics).
It’s the same thing with this ginned-up “crisis” of ‘transgender people are using restrooms of a gender not on their birth-certificate, OMG!!1!!’ Cases of transgender persons committing sexual violence against other people in restrooms are clearly rare–otherwise the forces of repression would be trumpeting them day and night.
We already have laws against people committing sexual violence against other people, whether in restrooms or anywhere else. As with “voter fraud,” this “solution” is about something other than what it purports to be about (in this case, it would appear, it’s about getting a certain type of voter motivated enough to get out and vote).
You equated being transgender with having a debilitating and fatal disease involving mental incompetence. I’m not saying you meant it as an insult or that you had any malice behind the comparison, but it just seems like a very skewed way of viewing these people.
My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s so I know first hand what that’s all about. I’ve also worked with and been friends with transgender people. I cannot see any way to equate these two things. That’s why it struck me as such an odd comparison and possibly illuminating as to why you feel the way you do about the issue.
Because they may have physical abnormalities and want to avoid confrontation. As I asked, got any examples of transgender people using open showers, were there any issues?
It took lots of people a long time to recognize that gay people weren’t sick in the head or otherwise deviant… I’m sure it will take a long time for many to accept that trans people aren’t similarly sick in the head or otherwise deviant.
Hopefully, some of them will think back and will have learned the lessons of their previous skepticism of homosexuality – just like gay people, trans people have no interest in harming anyone and only want to not be assaulted or otherwise harmed, and treated decently and fairly by society at large.
It seems to be very similar to homosexuality (to me, anyway), in that it’s not something that trans people chose to be, it just was, in the same way that I always thought I was a boy from the time of the development of my identity.
I’m sure Una could speak better to this than I could. (As usual. :))
I don’t know why you are portraying my statement in exactly the reverse of what I have said. The letter was in preparation for several months. What I have said is that the intended release date of the letter may have been something different than last week, but that it is possible that the release date was changed in response to the North Carolina attack on Civil Rights. The point is that this was not some hastily written document created in response to the NC legislature, but that it had been under consideration for a long time.
Of course, the Dear Colleague letter makes no effort to threaten schools with loss of funding, either. However, I will note that the Dear Colleague letter has a long tradition in the Department of Education (which issued the letter jointly with the Department of Justice). They, in fact, have a policy of providing guidance on numerous issues through exactly the same sort of document and your claim that they would (normally?) just answer individual questions when asked has no basis in fact. Dear Colleague letters is a primary method of providing all school systems with consistent information.
I saw the statement in one of the numerous articles in papers and the internet from the last two weeks and cannot now find it. Searching for “28,000” will not bring it up because the actual number was 28,465 or 28,095 or something like that, (which is why I only indicated “over 28,000”).
You are free to ignore that point, although your claim that such a request and response would have made a bigger splash in the news, like your erroneous claim that the various agencies would have only responded individually to individual requests rather than sending a document simultaneously to all interested parties, is not based on reality. How many of the over 300 Dear Colleague letters sent out over the last ten years (for example) have attracted even two inches of type in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Washington Post? This one was only reported after the North Carolina brouhaha blew up.
Then indeed we can’t hash things out. You don’t believe trans folks; you call them by nasty slurs; you compare them to folks who are mentally incompetent. This is not the basis of a respectful discussion.
This thread is now under extreme supervision. Anything from here on out derogatory - about anyone, any group or whatever - is going to earn a warning. Multiple warnings, possibly.
So, what’s the functional difference between you, and an anti-vaxxer? Or a climate change denier? Or a creationist? You all seem like people who are comfortable ignoring the science on a subject if it doesn’t comport with your preconceived notions of how things should work. What makes your opinion about transexuals more valid than Jenny McCarthy’s opinion on polio vaccines?
That’s not a very accepting or sympathetic-sounding way of framing mental illness. Seems to me you are complaining about stigmatizing transgenderism, while doing it to the mentally ill (who are, of course, far more numerous).
I still think a much more apt comparison is to anorexia, of seeing a fat person in the mirror when you are actually stick thin. (That’s not a perfect analogy either, of course. There is none.)
I would say it’s more akin to someone like Stephen Pinker, who takes a hardheaded, clear-eyed look at human nature in his book The Blank Slate but runs into heavy headwinds because his analysis flies in the face of the politically correct, “standard social science model” that holds sway at the academy and in polite society.
His credentials seem sound, but I have not an iota of doubt that **Una **or others will swoop in to excoriate him in apocalyptic terms, just as the egalitarian “blank slate” social scientists have attempted to do to Pinker. And so most psychiatrists will just see it as not worth the hassle to even attempt to go into this area. Thus we don’t really have a fair playing field for science at all.
And they’d be correct in doing so. If you want to hedge your argument with the opinion of an 84 year old and his archaic views, I doubt you’ll find much support.
He lacks support for his opinions in his own field. None of the scientific bodies share his opinion. People often invoke the prestige of John Hopkins to bolster his arguments, but John Hopkins as an institute disagrees with his positions.
[QUOTE=Dan Karasic, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, UC San Francisco]
Dr. McHugh writes about the study at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s showing poor outcomes from transgender surgeries, leading to Dr. McHugh shutting down Johns Hopkins’s transgender program in 1979, and the Department of Health and Human Services declaring transgender surgery experimental, and therefore not covered. Two weeks ago HHS reversed its 1981 decision and removed transgender health exclusions from Medicare. Dr. McHugh ignores the work in transgender health in these last 30 years that led to this reversal by HHS.
Dr. McHugh also mischaracterizes the treatment of gender-nonconforming children. As he states, most gender-nonconforming children do not identify as transgender in adulthood. However, those who receive puberty-blocking drugs do not do so until puberty, when transidentity is likely to persist. These drugs allow adolescents and their parents to work with doctors to achieve the best outcome. This approach was demonstrated to be successful in research in the Netherlands before being adopted widely in the U.S.
The American Psychiatric Association and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health no longer view transgender identity as inherently pathological. Dr. McHugh’s views are stuck in the past.
[/QUOTE]
But homosexuality is about what people prefer to do. “I like to kiss other men, and snuggle with them in bed late on Sunday mornings, and then make mohitos and go to brunch.” Cool, sounds like a nice weekend. “I’m not into all that romantic stuff, but I like to really get pounded by a dude.” Right on, knock yourself out: not my thing, but whatever floats your boat.
Similarly, I have not the slightest issue with someone like Eddie Izzard who likes to wear what would ordinarily be thought of as women’s clothing; nor with the dearly departed Prince and Bowie, who wore sexually ambiguous clothing. Rock on, guys–it’s all good.
None of this is the same as saying “regardless of what biology might tell us, I am a woman (or man, as the case may be), and I *demand *that everyone else affirm this as truth”.
BTW, if you search for that article (or even just the author’s name) and then click the link you get from the search, you can read the whole thing.
Actually I think they just want to be able to live their lives and be themselves, just like everyone else. Where are you seeing this demand for affirmation of truth? If anything they’d just like to be left alone and afforded the baseline level of respect that any human being deserves. At least that’s in my estimation anyway, and I can’t see how that’s an unreasonable thing to want.
No I haven’t, but I don’t base my opinions about these kinds of issues on things like that. I try to put myself in someone else’s shoes and see things from other perspectives, and usually things like empathy and compassion seem to follow from that. I certainly wouldn’t judge an entire category of people on the antics of the obnoxious few.
Gay rights aren’t transgender rights, as you have proven by example.
OMG, what bullcrap. I guess the millions of transgender people worldwide should, instead of pursuing the best course of treatment right now, should sit and wait it out. What’s wrong, was our suicide rate not high enough for you?
Good for you, you Googled and found an outlier who has already been debunked on a couple of threads in here. Steadfastly ignoring the overwhelming weight of medical opinion on my side of the debate. Go…you. :smack:
