So why should you worry about a stranger’s hair and clothes? Why care about gender if you can’t care about sex?
What do you tell a girl who says she’s not comfortable being in the room with someone with the appearance, body shape, voice, mannerisms etc. of a man? Not a cisgender male - she can’t tell what is in someone’s pants anyway, and you just told her not to - but just a man?
And if she might be wrong, why does it matter anyway? He might be a man, but she might actually be a woman. He might be cisgender male, or female.
No. Everyone is entitled to somewhere to pee, and personal self-identification (documented, not just spur-of-the-moment) is better than birth-certificate sex.
Whom do you want to give the power to make this exclusion? A whole new police sub-department, the bathroom police? Everybody has to carry an ID card, and an attendant checks everyone at the door?
Just let people do what they need to do. It’s a bathroom, not the CIA HQ at Langley.
If you behave like Miller than you are doing more damage to your cause than Fred Phelps. At least Fred gets people to start thinking about how horrible homophobes are. Miller gets us to thinking how horrible gay rights folks are.
And when the fuck was Stonewall? The frikking 1960’s? Yeah that obviously shifted you into light speed towards a general recognition of gay rights. And I remember stonewall differently than you might:
“Stonewall is often thought of as an uprising of gay men. In reality, “it was drag queens, Black drag queens, who fought the police at the famous Stonewall Inn rebellion in 1969,” wrote lesbian novelist and playwright Sarah Schulman in a 1985 novel. “Years later, a group of nouveau-respectable gays tried to construct a memorial to Stonewall in the park across from the old bar. The piece consisted of two white clone-like thin gay men and two white, young lesbians with perfect noses. They were made of a plaster-like substance, pasty and white as the people who paid for it.””
IIRC there was not as much solidarity between the gay community and the transgender community as there is today, even though the general public might have conflated the two.
When did he react the way Miller does? When did he say that people that didn’t fully endorse his views deserved to have their children taken away? After all a racist probably does more harm to their child than someone who is not comfortable discussing gender issues with 6 year olds.
IIRC things like a lone black woman standing up to injustice in Montgomery Alabama or the outrage of a nation at the murder of 4 young black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham Alabama were much more significant events than the angry preachings of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X.
But lets just say that you need this sort of asshat jerkery to create visibility on an issue and Asshat jerks like Miller are being asshat jerks because it is a necessary part of the development of civil rights. You don’t think that we have enough visibility on this issue? Sure people are ignorant, but yelling at them and saying they should have their children taken away is not the road to enlightenment you might think it is.
Well, you haven’t acted like a whiny asshat jerk yet. You’re angry and that’s fine, I don’t think that does any damage to your cause unless it becomes a defining feature of your cause. But, don’t demand that I put aside any and all questions in the face of your anger.
Sure, that’s fine. But every time someone says that I deserve to have my kids taken away because I don’t agree with them on something, it makes me see your arguments in a different light. Do whatever you want, it might not be what is most productive for your cause.
Telling people they shouldn’t have kids or should have their kids taken away if they don’t want to talk to their 6 year olds about transgender issues is about more than tone.
Saying that people should have their children taken away because they don’t want to do something that would make life easier for them is not merely “tone”
Perhaps you are confusing the issues that led to progress in the last ten years with all the issues that came up during the long period with very little progress over the last few decades. Noone was talking about locker rooms and bathrooms during the recent debate that led to gay marriage.
I don’t know if I would go that far, but I think a head of cabbage would be better than you.
Look, DA: you seem to be having a productive and respectful conversation with Una. I dig that, and I want to see it continue for as long as she wants it to.
If Miller’s words give you reason to hate, despise, condemn, or fear LGBTQ* people, despite that conversation and Una’s admirable patience, there is nothing I can say that will change that. You do you. Obviously you will no matter what.
Just to drop my pair of pennies on the forum floor with the rest of them, a quick word on anger:It is not a tactic, it is a response to stimuli. In this case, it’s an absolutely justified response to JAQ special questioning which purports to seek education but feels to those being questioned like just another demand from a majority group that the minority group justify their right to exist within the same society. In plain effect, that exercise is just a more passive-aggressive type of queer bashing, the type which treats them as Others imposing on your Way of Life. As if they landed from Mars in the recent past, and haven’t been part of your precious society from the beginning.
When you dismiss the honest rage as some sort of calculated approach, it’s not only insulting and condescending and dehumanizing, it’s also the thing that will prevent you from ever really comprehending how the issue affects you or your society. Una is, with remarkable restraint and professionalism, using education and exposure to fight the bigotry against her minority group. This is assuredly not for your limited benefit, but is how she speaks to the larger audience, as a full time advocate. Don’t expect that sort of restraint as a matter of course in casual discussion, and certainly you’re a fool if you demand it from all respondents.
I can demand it but I know I won’t get it, but don’t demand that I just sit there and meekly accept whatever abuse you want to heap on me. I expressed concern about exposing transgender issues to young children, the response was “we should take children away from people who don’t want to expose their children to these issues”
This is after I point out that I support an ADA undue burden standard for accommodation of transgender use of public facilities and am pretty comfortable with transgender adults. The fact that transgender issues are not exactly clear for me among minors suddenly means I should have my children taken away. Maybe I am missing something. Is questioning transgenderism among children really as horrible as saying you should have your children taken away?
“To be fair there are not a lot of posters who are committed to making sure that queers DON’T get treated like regular people. Its a bit of an echo chamber.”
I was trying to point out that this is not a hostile environment for your side of the argument.
No, its not changing m opinion on the LGBT debate its just changing my opinion on Miller and how this site picks moderators. But I do think that this “I can treat people like shit because I’ve suffered sooooo much” attitude is bad for your cause. Una has been almost shockingly open and frank in answering my questions and as she answer my questions I am encouraged to ask the more difficult questions, the kind that you can’t ask in polite company. I don’t think I am not much more ignorant on these issues than the average citizen so if you think that shouting at people like me is going to help your cause in some way then I don’t see how.
I have been having a shouting match with Miller not because I started shouting at him but because Miller started shouting at me for asking questions about transgenderism in young children and Miller said people like me should have their children taken away if they don’t want to expose their young children to transgender issues. And everyone jumped to Miller’s defense. Noone seemed to think he had said anything wrong, it was just righteous indignation on his part.
This is a pretty safe environment for pro-rights of almost any kind (other than gun rights, and even there its sort of a push) and I realize that even asking questions is frowned upon here, but I can ask questions here that I can’t ask in real life either because I am not close enough to anyone who is informed on transgender issues to get a reasonably informed answer or because it seems too personal to ask. I am not getting these questions from some hate group website, I am not intentionally poking sore spots or trying to piss people off. These are the questions that I have and if I can’t ask them here, where the fuck CAN I ask them? Am I just supposed to think what you tell me to think?
yeah, that’s pretty much it. The problem is many people come here “just asking questions” and they are clueless assholes, so whenever anyone truly has a question, it gets drowned out by defense mechanisms and legitimate anti-hate responses.
