The vast majority of the time, I would. The exceptions are when I need to interact with their genitalia–and it’s vanishingly rare that I need to interact with the genitalia of anyone who’s not me or my spouse.
That biological reality just isn’t the important part of how I interact with people.
I’m not sure I see a useful distinction between the OP’s Bad Religion and Good Religion person beyond “Good” religion person trying to be “better” by accepting others might have a different opinion while they, personally, are in the same camp as “Bad” Religion.
I think the obvious other one is men’s and women’s sports. Separate sports leagues were created, at least in large part, to account for the generalized athletic advantages biological men have over biological women. There have been some rare, but well publicized examples, of trans women competing in women’s competitions where it seems, at least to a casual observer, that the trans woman has a clear, overwhelming physical advantage over the biological females she is competing against.
I’m just not about that, for reasons that we’ve been over too many times to count. Briefly:
That said, this thread is about religion, transphobia, and category errors. If there’s anything more to be said on these lines, we should probably take it to a different thread.
Religion is hardly ever a completely internal process. Judaism isn’t at all. Christianity and other religions have heretics. You can’t simply declare by your internal process that are you are one with them if your articulated, external beliefs don’t match up with others who have already appropriated the term and are using it in a group sense. So in that case your feelings don’t matter. If you believe by your internal process that Jesus was really a woman, you are not going to be in the group with other Christians who do not believe this.
We have other groups, racial groups, where it is considered offensive to declare that by your internal process you are part of the group.
So it’s a question for others that taking the ability of subgroups to define themselves away is an unalloyed good.
Of course I can. I can say, “I am a Christian, and I also believe that Jesus was a woman.” Who the hell are you–or anyone else–to tell me that I don’t identify as a Christian?
It just occurred to me that there’s a very close real-world religious analogy to the trans debate, and that my own positions at first glance seem inconsistent.
I’m talking about the “Jews for Jesus” movement; ethnically Jewish people who have accepted Christ as their savior and go around wearing crosses and studying the Gospels (all OK so far)…and who insist that the religion they are practicing is called “Judaism” (this is where my head explodes).
In order to express their sense of their personal identities, those people are asserting themselves to be members of a group which, for the last several millennia, everyone has considered them to be, by definition, not members of. And I CAN’T STAND THOSE PEOPLE!
So what’s the difference here? Am I simply being hypocritical?
On reflection, I think the distinction is that these groups pose actual threats to the normative Jewish community. They are actively attempting to convert Jews, and particularly target people with a vague ethnic sense of Jewishness, but not enough religious knowledge to realize what they’re being sold. Moreover, by popularizing the notion that one can convert to Christianity and still be “Jewish”, they could encourage anti-Semitism against the “unreasonable” Jews who refuse to do so.
In short, I dislike them because I feel threatened by them. Which I suppose is exactly how the transphobes feel about trans people. The discussion then turns on the question of whether those feelings are rationally justified, which is going to be much more productive than abstract philosophical arguments about what words “really” mean.
Also, I want to be clear that my dislike for “Messianic Jews” extends to wanting to publicize their dishonesty, and to ostracizing them from the Jewish community. I don’t want the government to forbid them from calling themselves Jews or from wearing yarmulkes, or public libraries to refuse to carry their books, nor do I want their rabbis to be arrested for teaching false doctrine to children. So I guess there are still some significant moral differences between myself and the transphobes.
(Wow, on preview, it looks like the conversation was already moving in this direction! Great minds and all…)
Plenty of other Christians have done this in the past. That’s why we have sects, denominations and religious movements in general.
I think the analogy breaks down when we consider genders to be “subgroups” in the same sense as racial or religious groups, though. Most people would agree that members of those sorts of groups have the right to decide who is in the group, and their definitions may evolve over time. People who think that the categories of “men” and “women” are biologically determined don’t think that the people in those categories are free to change the definition of the category.
Just a side note that J4J is not Jewish people who accept Jesus, it’s an evangelical Christian movement founded by a Baptist minister. The only ones I know were Catholic, converted to Judaism so they could join the J4J.
Yeah–Jews for Jesus are one of those very rare cases where I believe someone is lying about their internal state. The gender equivalent would be a group of folks who stopped identifying as men and identified as women and immediately started going to women-only spaces to advocate for men’s rights ideology.
There are two important differences between those folks and trans women:
No, I’m not. The existence of people that don’t care about this are completely irrelevant to my argument. But among people that do care, it’s a part of their identity, and a deep one at that.
I’m certain there is at least one person in the world for whom it is really, really important to their being that they have an immortal soul, to the point where they construct their entire lives around the idea. And I am here telling you that I think this person is deluded and that their inner experience on this front is a fiction. And that it’s not hate speech or even particularly frowned upon for me to announce this. (in practice, the number is much more than one, but I only need one for my argument)
That’s true, but only within reason. If a man tells me he identifies as a Muslim, but then I catch him burning a Quran while wolfing down a bacon sandwich and sputtering ”Christ is King!” between mouthfuls, it’s more reasonable for me to assume that the man is either lying or simply doesn’t know what a Muslim is than it is for me to assume that he sincerely identifies as a Muslim.
Similarly, if a male tells the world they self-identity as a woman, but they then proceed to make absolutely no concessions to femininity whatsoever, to what extent should I accept that this person even understands what they’re saying? This isn’t hypothetical, by the way. I used to work with someone who self-ID’d as a woman but still presented as very masculine. I get that such cases are rare, but they’re not unheard of.
Yes, all those things you mention are internal experiences, just like sense of gender. That’s why the way we deal with them is a good guide to the way we deal with people’s attribution to themself of gender feelings.
For instance, churches that don’t want you to take communion unless you’re Christian are indeed subject to the possibility that people might just lie about that for the purpose of getting a bit of bread and alcohol. They’ve decided that they can pretty much live with that possibility, because the only danger is that they might have to extend their bread and wine budget (any other consequences are on the atheist communion-taker). When it comes to more important situations - like, who can get jobs in the church - they will usually do more investigative digging to find out not just whether the person has an internal feeling, but are their real-life actions consistent with it.
If I told you I was gay, and you were aware that I’ve been married to a man for 25 years, and then asked how many times I’d kissed a girl and I truthfully reply “zero”, then add “but I really feel like I’m gay on the inside”, probably you wouldn’t believe that. If I said I’m a Bengals fan but I’ve never been to a game, and there’s a different team that I go to all the games of and cheer for enthusiastically, then probably I’m fooling either myself or you.
Checking people’s claims about themselves against objective measures, then deciding whether to believe or not, is a very normal human activity.
If your primary school age child tells you they have a headache and that they’re too sick to go to school, you might very well try to do some external verification (are they wincing? Moving slowly? Look pale?). If it was on the day of a big test in some subject they weren’t good at, doubly so. Because saying you’re sick for the purpose of getting out of school is a pretty common small child behavior.
In order to claim a benefit that other people are not allowed to have, the standards need to be higher. For instance, it used to be the case in most of Europe that to be in government or do various jobs, you needed to say you believed whatever the dominant variant of Christianity was in that country. We generally stopped doing that, because it’s a bad idea. a) anyone can just make a belief claim, and b) in any case, your religious beliefs should be irrelevant to whether you can do a good job in Parliament.
This is a very good match for eg the womens’ sports situation. a) anyone can make a claim of internal womanhood if they like, and b) gender feelings are irrelevant to sport.
Right.
Disagree if you want to, but insulting a belief is being a jerk.
Disagreeing is fine, but not mocking or insulting.
Religion and assertions gender identity don’t compare well. Gender identity has far more scientific support, and at least as important people asserting a gender identity aren’t trying to force their identity on everyone else like the religious tend to do. Transwomen aren’t insisting on mandatory estrogen treatments for everyone, nor are transmen doing the opposite, which they’d have to be doing to make the analogy work.
There’s also the issue that it’s the religious who are trying to hurt people who don’t fit into their neatly assigned gender-boxes and not the opposite; this is entirely too much like trying to blame the victim.
No, it’s a big deal; atheists are considered the worst by far because they deny the value of faith. To paraphrase from memory a quote I read from some bishop as a kid that has stuck from me over the decades, “It’s better to kill for Kali than save people as an atheist, because at least killing for a false goddess upholds faith.” And I have in later years heard Christian fundamentalists talk approvingly of Islamic fundamentalists taking over a nation because even a “false religion” is better than the utter evil of secularism. I’ve heard it used as an argument for why the US conquest of Iraq was a good thing; at least it destroyed the secularism that Saddam imposed on Iraq and let the Islamic believers impose themself on everyone.
Since they have no facts to support them - and fundamentalists certainly don’t want their beliefs judged on their actions - they have to uphold faith as an all-important virtue or they have no justification for their beliefs at all. Muslims and Buddhists and so forth don’t threaten that; atheists do.
There’s a reason that fundamentalists tend to believe that salvation is achieve through “faith, not works”; they really don’t want is to be judged on the latter. Or worse, to actually feel compelled to do nice things for people.
First, I often treat children differently from adults, thanks. Second, there’s a long and storied history of kids and adults faking illness to get out of unpleasant experience, so long and storied that there’s a word for it, “malingering.” No such history exists of trans folks; it is vanishingly rare, despite Hollywood and Shakespeare, for a child or adult to pretend they’re a gender they’re not for personal gain.
Did you mean “I told you I was straight”? Otherwise this makes no sense.
If that’s what you meant, it’s still very silly, because that doesn’t happen.
Repeatedly, metaphors that attack gender identity reference either analogical events that don’t exist, or trans people that don’t exist. There’s a reason for that.
Meanwhile, defense of gender identity reference real-world analogies and real-world trans people. There’s also a reason for that.
I believe Aspidistra is a woman 
Ah, thank you! Bad assumption on my part. I have no objective evidence that this is true other than her words, but I’ll trust her gender identity.
So what? Are you advocating that this board’s rules should be determined by the existence of this person?