Republicans' war on transgender people: Omnibus thread

The BBQ Pit
1761

Should a business be able to fire a person just got being transgender? Your side wants that. Should schools be able to ban all transgender people from being around kids. Your side wants that. Should I be able to kick a transgender person out of my store or restaurant based on how I think a gender should look? You side wants that.

Your side wants to erase transgender people from all aspects of public life. You don’t want them to have rights, you want them to cower in fear because you think they are a human aberration.

1762

I don’t think that people should be excluded from jobs because of their identity feelings, and I’m not campaigning for that.

1763

I do not want to put words in your mouth, but I asked (bolding mine):

…not “I feel female.” If a transgender woman says, “I am a female,” do you feel that that is not fine?

1764

By the common meaning of English words, it’s not true.

If they’re so much in the progressive bubble that they honestly think it’s common for people to use “female” to mean “person with a completely male body including penis and testicles but a woman gender identity” then they’re wrong and badly connected to reality, but not actually lying (except maybe to themselves)

If they had a lot of work done to excise the male parts of themselves, then I still think they’re wrong but could maybe tolerate “I’m not male”

If they say that to someone knowing or having reason to believe that that person’s definition of “female” is the usual one - person born with a female reproductive system - then yes, that’s a lie. That also applies to places that say they’re offering “female-only” services when they know there are people with fully male bodies included within that (see, eg, the continuing drama around Edinburgh Rape Crisis where staff continually lied to and gaslit sexually assaulted women, knowing that these women had been recently assaulted by penis-people and therefore had excellent reason to want no penis-people in their recovery space)

1765

By the way, in context of this thread, it’s worth noting that even extremely trans-friendly services have recently found it necessary to offer sex-based services that exclude people born male so that people born female can be comfortable. It’s not just a Terf thing.

(Don’t worry folks, you can safely click on the link. They totally think trans-women are women! Still can’t get away from the need for female-sex-only stuff though…)

1766

The meaning of those particular English words, like the meaning of many other English words, is changing over time. You don’t get to draw a charmed circle around the words “female” and “male” and “man” and “woman” and say that they’re not allowed to have widely recognized meanings that are broader than they used to be.

If you want to specify that a person was assigned female at birth, for example, you can state that, or use the acronym “AFAB” or similar. “Born with a female reproductive system” is less accurate, unless you happen to know exactly what kind of reproductive system a particular individual was born with, which you can’t know just from their birth-assigned sex category. (For example, plenty of people were assigned female or male at birth, and subsequently lived their lives in accordance with that assignment, who turned out to have intersex reproductive systems.)

So what? There are special types of services offered for people who are, e.g., post-menopausal, or pregnant, or post-vasectomy, or transgender, or bisexual, or whatever. There’s nothing inherently wrong with also offering some special types of services specifically for cisgender people.

And in general, supporters of transgender rights don’t have a problem with that. As a universal principle, everybody’s entitled to basic levels of personal privacy and security. The thing is, though, that transphobes aren’t entitled to enforce their personal definitions of privacy and security by demanding that transgender women be classified or treated as men.

Just as we wouldn’t be entitled, for example, to demand that black people must automatically be excluded from recovery spaces being used by a non-black person who was recently assaulted by a black person, we’re not entitled to make similar demands about women with penises.

Everybody’s entitled to privacy and security, including not being nonconsensually exposed to the sight of any stranger’s genitalia. But transphobes are dishonestly misusing that universal principle specifically for the persecution of trans people.

1767

This is because, for a variety of reasons, we tend to “read” people of ambiguous gender as male. This means that many trans women will always look at least somewhat “male” at first glance, whereas almost all trans men who take testosterone “pass” as men, and are accepted without thought in male spaces. So people who don’t think about the issues much just don’t notice that they exist.

A secondary reason is that people are afraid of men, much more than they are afraid of women. So no one frets about a trans man in a male-only space. (Although not that long ago, men fretted a lot about gays in male spaces.)

Of course, if these laws play out, we will have trans men in female spaces, and that’s going to be a lot more upsetting to the typical woman-in-a-changing-room than trans women. Because trans men look, smell, and generally give off vibes of “MAN”.

(When East Germany first started giving androgens to their Olympic athletes, it was discovered because the other female athletes were uncomfortable with the men in the changing rooms: despite those “men” being assigned female at birth, having female body parts, and mostly identifying as women. But they had been given enough androgens that they “felt male” to other women.)

If Donald Trump gets his way, it’s going to be extremely dangerous to exist as a trans man. There won’t be any safe restroom or changing room to use, people will call the cops either way. And because some of the changes from taking T are irreversible, it’s not easy to just pretend to be a woman again. Many of those people will never “pass” as a cis woman. So they can break the law and use the men’s room, it they can expect to have their papers checked and be harassed is they use the women’s room.

It’s honestly looking pretty bleak.

1768

A small bit of less-bleak news from Montana.

1769

Seriously, what the fuck is it with ‘restrooms’? I walk into a stall, I take a pee, I come out and wash my hands and exit the restroom. I don’t see other people’s genitalia, I don’t care whether they have a penis or vagina, it’s really not an issue, unless someone is flashing their labia or their penis around for all to admire.

I’m 65. It’s never happened.

1770

So I SHOULDN’T be going out to the strip club? Better call and cancel my Uber.

1771

And the changing rooms in all the nearby shops are little individual rooms. I go in, i try on clothes, i look in the mirror. Maybe i go out to ask my husband what he thinks. I’ve never seen another person’s genitalia in a department store changing room, either.

There are a few places where i do strip “in public”. The family camp i go to used to have a men’s room and a women’s room for getting into you bathing suit. A few years ago they bought some heavy curtains, like they use in hospitals. Now we have eight little individual changing stalls, and they don’t have any gender associated with them. (And i realize that the ones that used to be the men’s room are the more convenient ones, of course, lol.) And my gym has a large open changing area by the lockers. They also have a couple of smaller, less convenient individual rooms that are used by, as best as i can tell, religious Muslims and trans women, since those are the people who care. But they’re just there, for when wants them. And the ladies locker room at another gym i sometime go to has curtained areas but the showers than one could use of one doesn’t want to take off their clothes in sight of the other people who are changing.

This just feels like a very minor issue that has been blown out of proportion by people who hate trans women.

1772

:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: ok, yeah, I missed the “consent” stipulation

1773

They all are. They always are, whether it’s bathrooms or drag queens or teachers exposing their children to the “ideology” of queer people having the audacity to exist. We are rapidly approaching the ratio of “1 piece of legislation protecting the sanctity of sport” to “1 actual trans athlete,” and that hasn’t stopped this from being something that people still really want you to know they have Understandable Concerns about.

Of course, “how can I, a normal person, possibly coexist in with people I was raised to find inferior” is something we have been through before. If I voiced my Understandable Concerns by saying, for instance, that:

However well-intentioned, the use of trans players would hazard all the physical properties of baseball

or

the state already has a law barring trans [competitors] and cis [competitors] from fighting one another in boxing matches. “If transgenders are allowed to play, it will break up the league"

or voicing my agreement when quoting a newspaper (or the brain trust at “Two Genders One Truth”) about an organization taking matters into its own hands:

In the interests of harmony and to prevent a possible breakup of the league, by the 1st day of this month, no more trans players will be signed this season

posters here would immediately call me out as a transphobe or worse. They might even question my sources by saying things like “hey, Alex, why are you quoting what people said in the 1930s/40s about color lines in sport but replacing words for Black people with ‘trans’?” Alas, I have been exposed. But not in a bathroom, thank goodness.

I would hope most folks with Concerns today are clear-eyed enough to realize they would also have fought against Jackie Robinson. Some of them are not, since those guys were just irrational racists, and racism is something only bad people do. But, like. They would’ve.

They would have opposed the disrupting effects of desegregation—asked why this had to be done so quickly, lamented the invective of pushy activists; demanded the feelings of people having “their” spaces “invaded” be listened to.

It imagine it flatters such individuals to think otherwise, but I’m not obligated to… how would they put it? They can self-identify as “tolerant” all they want, but I’m not obligated to respect it. Words have meanings.

Because the most interesting aspect of contemporary reporting, incidentally, is the extent to which it really focuses on—of course—the exact same thing as bathrooms, viz. the possibility that white players might be made uncomfortable.

Mauer, who is a native of Illinois, said: “When there was no assurance the Negro player would not appear, my boys said they wouldn’t play. They are all Southern boys, and you understand the situation which confronted me.”

It was explained, however, that in such sports involving individual body contact, such as boxing and wrestling, the [Coast Guard Academy] “prefers not to have Negroes compete.”

This is partly how I counteract what would otherwise be a pervasive sense of doom: we know how that turned out. Eventually, the Coast Guard Academy got told to take their “preferences” and shove it, the world moved on, and baseball wasn’t destroyed. Rowling and the Skull-Measurers are on the wrong side of history. But it does make for a depressing present.

1774

I am begging you people to at least occasionally consider the possibility that people get upset about things because they are genuinely terrible for them and not just “oh, ha! those them people. Those other tribe people My tribe told me all about them - they’re the ones who get off on being mean for Absolutely No Reason”.

Lots of women have had terrible experiences of sexual assault, and there’s nothing to distinguish a random transwoman-with-a-penis who you don’t know personally as a friend from any old bozo who might be a groper.

And this habit people have of keeping themselves pure of spirit by hiding from the opposing opinions is a terrible habit. There are legions of actual left-wing women trying desperately to get people’s attention on what they’re actually saying rather than caricatures put forward by media whose chief aim is to stir up anger and frustration to get people clicking. Jeanette Cooper! Eliza Mondegreen! Heterodorx podcast. None of these people are “hateful” or gonna turn you all into Republicans

1775

Whenever I see such incredibly obvious yet also incredibly un-self-aware hateful bigotry in people like Aspidistra I wonder if it’s possible that I have some bigotry and hatred inside me that I’m unaware of. If so, I sure hope someone tells me. It must suck to be filled with hatred and not realize it.

1776

My “female reproductive system” has been entirely removed. Does that mean I’m no longer a woman?

1777

And clearly choosing to go out in a blaze of idiotically misguided glory in the last moments before the virtual guillotine falls.

1778

Tell me again why I can’t conclude that this position on it’s face doesn’t tell me that transmen are going to barred from “female only spaces”?

1779

There actually are a lot of things. Like, trans women generally take androgen blockers and estrogen, and you can tell that from a distance because hormones matter a lot. Trans women usually make a point of dressing and grooming in female ways. And despite a few widely publicized cases, trans women who look exactly like men generally choose to use men’s facilities, when they need to pick. Because, you know, most people don’t want to make a scene when they just need to pee.

A few years back, i had a trans male student who looked pretty feminine. Enough that he had to ask me to ask an older guy in the class to stop misgendering him. So i was a little surprised to see him use the ladies room. But it made sense, he just needed to pee, and that was the room that would draw less attention to him.

He’s still around in my dance club 4 years later. And today, no one would think he’s a girl. I assume he’s been on T. He’s bulked up, has 5 o’clock shadow, and just looks like a guy. I bet he’s using the men’s room now. And if he used a women-only space, women who had been assaulted by men in the past, who are made uncomfortable by men, would be pretty uncomfortable. It’s not as if I’ve ever seen whether the person in the next stall has a dick. My guess is that he doesn’t, because I’m close enough to his partner that I’d likely have heard if he had major surgery of any sort. But it’s not the dick that makes people uncomfortable standing next to a guy at the sinks.

And of course, a lot of trans people have also had terrible experiences of sexual assault. A lot of men have been sexually assaulted, too, for that matter.

But here’s the thing. You can’t actually legislate, “use the facility that you look like, and that will upset the fewest people”. Because that’s subjective, and the only way to strictly enforce it is to ban a lot of people (including a lot of cis people who happen to have bodies that don’t exactly meet people’s expectations) from using public facilities altogether.

why was it my job to tell that old man to stop misgendering another student

I teach a square dance class that has a mix of college students and random other adults. The older guy was probably older than i am. The trans man was then an undergraduate. In addition to teaching it, I’m one of the “safer dances coordinators”. It’s my job to deal with guys who make women uncomfortable. But it’s also my job to intervene when someone holds hands too hard (usually panic, not sexual) or when people in the dance group do other things that make other dancers uncomfortable. So i get the misgendering cases, as well as the “asks me to dance too often”, “puts his hands on the wrong places”, and “followed a woman home in a threatening way” cases.

1780

Lots of men from men, too, and women from other women. I guess we should just ban people in general from changing rooms.