Since this could be interpreted as a personal attack on a poster, I’ll revise the second part of my post to say “Others are free to call your statements bigoted based on these choices you make”.
What if you’re a man and one day you’ve landed in hospital and a test reveals you’ve had a uterus all along hidden behind some other organ, and that you’re actually one gene over the line into female?
Can we then insist you use the ladies room? Discount your entire identity as a man as fraud? Can we tell all your friends and colleagues the ‘truth’? What about those guys on your softball team, how will they feel?
Now, what if the state/society insists on now classifying you as female, even though you’ve fathered children?
Or is it suddenly not all about genitalia and genes, and now more about how you’ve identified and lived as your truth ?
I don’t think that sport is a human right any more than any other human activity performed for fun or financial gain.
Ultimately, someone transitioning either way should be free to rise to the level in sport that their ability allows. The only reason that any problem exists in the first place is that we have accepted that gender restrictions are necessary in the first place and the dawning realisation that gender is not neat like weight or height classifications is throwing up potential problems.
Imagine that Tennis did not operate a gender-specific classification but instead merely assigned rankings that reflected ability and organised tournaments based on those, perhaps the top 128 players make it to Wimbledon. The next 256 play elsewhere and so on.
Problem solved, you earn what your ability deserves and you play against those of your level. If your level of play catches the attention of the paying spectators and sponsors then you’ll do very nicely.
Your “classic” definitions will probably “work” for 90-95% of the people you meet. Why not give yourself the flexibility for the other 5-10%? It doesn’t change anything about who you are. It’s just recognizing how modern society is functioning.
This is the same rationale that a lot of conservatives invoke for refusing to use the terms “husband” and “wife” to refer to same-sex spouses. At some point, insisting on “classic definitions” becomes simply refusing to acknowledge reality.
Nobody’s denying that a transgender woman is (usually) biologically different from a cisgender woman, just as the spouse of a gay husband is (usually) biologically different from the spouse of a straight husband. But the point is that for the purposes of ordinary social interactions, the identity is more important than the biology.
Refusing to acknowledge that just seems like pointless obstructionism, like refusing to change your clocks for Daylight Saving Time. Yeah, we get it that moving the clocks forward in the spring is an artificial social construct that moves the concept of “time” farther away from its roots in astronomical reality (not that arbitrary time zones were such a great approximation to the fundamental astronomical reality of true local time in the first place, mind you). But so what?
Clock time is a human invention that models the complicated physical reality of the periodic motions of the earth in a simplified way for the sake of human convenience. Similarly, binary gender is a human invention that models the complicated biological reality of genetics, anatomy, and neurobiology in a simplified way for the sake of human convenience. There is no absolute objectively correct definition of “a man” or “a woman”, any more than there’s an absolute objectively correct definition of “a day” or “a month”. So why make such a fuss over modifying the definitions somewhat to make them more useful for human purposes?
Best username/post combo ever.
One of the rah’rah abortion protesters told me “Your sister can’t have a wife” So I now refer to her as “my sister and her legally wedded wife.” Of course this adoption supporter also told me the children my sister’s wife birthed and my sister adopted were not my nieces.
Words change meaning all the time. Deal with it.
Sure thing.
Speaking of which, I hope you don’t mind that I’ll be calling you “Cheryl” until I’ve seen genetic results showing that you have XY chromosomes. 
Well, not in Great Debates.
But my point is that MarvinKitFox’s complaint doesn’t really make sense when directed at the OP or transgender people in general, rather than at the people who are actually doing the thing he’s complaining about.
It’s like if I asked “What do you want me to do about such-and-such political issue?” and you replied “Stop the President’s Twitter account from tweeting about it all the time!” Uh, I’m not the one who’s doing the thing you’re complaining about: you should take it up with the President instead.
Similarly, if MarvinKitFox doesn’t want to be hearing about transgender issues everywhere he goes, he should take it up with the people who are making the big fuss about transgender issues: namely, those who are complaining about the existence of transgender people. The vast majority of transgender people themselves, as well as their non-transgender allies, would be perfectly content having transgender people just go about their business with their preferred gender identity and not singling them out or treating them differently from other men and women in ordinary social interactions. It’s the anti-transgender people who are the ones being LOUD and frenetic over this.
And I accept you as a “thinking” “person”.
That is why we use the term “person”. And the actual number is around 0.6%.
So again, back to the OP. Please feel free to do what you want. I would accept you as a coworker or neighbor and if you asked me to I would use whatever pronoun you wanted me to use.
That would be like eliminating title 9 and along with that, eliminating separate sports programs for women in favor of sports based solely on athletic ability. That would have its ups and downs. Some women would make teams some would not. There might be a push for more A and B teams or just more sports in general.
In that case, what’s it even mean to “not accept” such a person “as a woman”? Suppose that, say, Mrs. Alice Jones is a transgender woman at your workplace, and somebody who’s allocating restroom space asks you “how many women are there on this floor of the building?” Do you say “There are five women”, which includes Mrs. Jones, or do you say “There are four women, and also Mrs. Jones uses the women’s restroom, but I don’t consider her a woman”?
Because the latter response seems to me just gratuitously dickish and gossipy, while the former is treating Mrs. Jones no differently from the other women at work, which is what I’d consider the ethical thing to do. In that case, all you mean by “I won’t accept you as a woman” is basically “I won’t treat you differently from other women in ordinary social interactions but I’ll think of you in a different category from other women inside my own head”, which is not really anybody else’s business.
I wasn’t aware that the chemtrails finally successfully transed Alex Jones. The trans agenda is complete!
to me a lot of people would be happy with the " don’t ask or tell " philosophy that way they don’t have to change their worldview any
I dont know.
Your talking about something at the business management level which I dont deal with. Usually companies set a policy. I only fix the bathrooms. I dont dictate who gets to use them.
I was wondering that myself. What does it mean for you to “accept someone (a coworker or neighbor) as a woman”? That you lust after her? That you hit on her? That you hold the door open for her? That you don’t cuss or fart in her presence? That you don’t ask her if you can borrow her power tools?
For the most part, why would it matter to you whether a co-worker or neighbor is a man or a woman?
You’re fighting the hypothetical, but I get that you haven’t had to look at the question in that sort of way before.
If, for some reason, it was up to you to answer that question, what would your answer be?
So why do you keep calling her “he”? :dubious:
Classic definition? So, you would be rather comfortable with the classic Greek definition of what a man is, what friendship between males meant?
When the IOC uses the phrase “sport as a human right”, I interpret it to mean not solely that humans have the right to participate in the Olympics, but that sport is an integral part of how humans interact with one another. Little League, pick-up basketball, work hockey leagues, high school wrestling, Superbowl parties, etc. Sport supports physical and emotional health, and it fosters social connection. “Sport is a human right” is more like “Play is an essential part of what it means to be human”.