[QUOTE=Me] That’s what it takes for what? You keep acting as if every school district has dealt with this or has clearly defined rules and procedures. They don’t. My point is that all those people worrying about boys scamming their way into girls locker rooms and everyone concerned with fairness, equality, and accommodation should address situations like this with all the information.
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You quoted the bolded part, responding:
[QUOTE=You]
But the school district doesn’t have to. All they have to rely upon is a diagnosis from a psychologist or psychiatrist.
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I responded:
[QUOTE=Me]
Not really. No complex policy can just be adjudicated based on doctor’s discretion alone. That’s not to say it’s shouldn’t be valued an considered, but what you suggest is not reasonable. You can’t even get extra time on the SAT solely based on a doctor’s diagnosis. There has to be a process, and part of that process should be some system that gives all stakeholders a chance to weigh in.
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You then said:
[QUOTE=You]
We’re not talking about a national examination, we’re talking about a relatively simple policy. The diagnosis of a doctor can set policy for how a student is treated with respect to other medical conditions, on a school by school basis sometimes.
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The record is clear and it was clarified from there. This line of discussion has nothing to do with doctor shopping. You essentially argued a doctor’s diagnosis should be the end all be all. Are you now trying to walk that back?
You are the one refusing to admit this exchange happened and trying every means possible to avoid doing the honorable thing and admitting that I had previously said what you tried to educate me on. So now know you aren’t taking this topic seriously, you’re just baiting me and others here.
More obfuscation. You are skipping multiple posts. The posts I quoted were responses to one another. Yes, I suppose if you selectively excise multiple quotes from the conversation, it might appear you were talking about doctor shopping, something that only you brought up initially. The reality is you were not, and the record is preserved there for anyone who wants to view it.
Just to put a finer point on the bullshit you are trying to peddle here. There is this exchange which you conveniently ignored:
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
Then you agree when I said the decision making process should not be SOLELY based on a doctor’s discretion.
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[QUOTE=You]
No.
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Now if you were talking about doctor shopping and how that could be a problem, you would have agreed that the decision shouldn’t be solely based on a doctor’s discretion. You declined to do that, and now you are backpedaling since that would be a ridiculous and untenable policy if for no other reason than doctor’s often disagreeing even when presented with the same evidence.
But please, go ahead with your nonsensical revisionism.
In other words, your argument is based on the claim that transgender girls who identify and present as girls “aren’t really girls”, in the same way that a black man with vitiligo isn’t really a white man just because his appearance is superficially white.
But that claim is exactly what the transgender-rights movement (and modern physiology and psychology as well) are disputing.
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
[…] for better or worse, “happening to have a penis/vagina” is the largest part of the rationale for separation in the first place.
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Red herring. The anatomical/sexual rationale for separating boys from girls en masse, i.e., segregating restrooms by gender in the first place, isn’t valid as a justification for rigidly assigning every individual to a restroom based solely on anatomy.
After all, by your reasoning, you could just as well argue that a boy who happens to lose his penis in a catastrophic accident is thenceforth entitled to use the girls’ restroom.
As I said above, the question here is not about whether we should segregate certain facilities by gender or why we segregate them by gender. It’s about whether members of one gender who happen to have atypical genitalia for their gender should be denied access to their gender’s designated facilities.
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
So can bigender people use either facility? Do we create separate facilities for genderless, trigender, and pangender people? Why or why not?
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We let students decide for themselves what gender they identify as for restroom-preference purposes, based on the restroom gender options available in our current infrastructure. It’s really not anywhere near as complicated as you’re trying to suggest.
Don’t worry, we’re not going to have masses of nonbinary schoolchildren suddenly throwing our schools into chaos with their variable restroom preferences.
In my experience, agender, genderfluid, bigender, and gender non-conforming people are fine with using their cis-gendered restroom (some support non-gendered restrooms, but plenty of cis and trans people do as well). A small few may want to use opposite-gendered restrooms, but those people are usually experiencing significant enough distress that they’re considering HRT or surgery, but for whatever reason aren’t confident in calling themselves trans (which is fine).
I’ve certainly never seen anyone wanting the right to use a given bathroom based on how they’re feeling that day, and if I saw it personally I’d think that person was trying to make a point rather than actually suffering significant dysphoria and mental distress because they couldn’t use a specific restroom on Tuesday and another the following Thursday. I could be wrong, and maybe in 10 years we’ll all agree that gendered restrooms are abhorrent because of non-binary gendered individuals, but there ya go.
Not to hijack the thread, but are there any cases where a transgendered person has decided (after changing genders) to revert to his/her’s previous genders?
Yes, certainly. Bypassing various potentially dubious or agenda-driven sources with names like SexChangeRegret and so forth, it’s easy to find peer-reviewed and presumably reputable studies such as the one reported in this PubMed abstract:
But, as you pointed out, the question of whether some transgender people eventually change their minds about their gender identity is not really relevant to this debate.*
The point is that by default, an individual is the best judge of their own self-identified gender. Consequently, transgender individuals are entitled to use the same restrooms that other people of their self-identified gender use.
They certainly should not have to put up with strangers rummaging around in their underwear, literally or metaphorically, in order to officiously and intrusively check their self-identified gender against their genital anatomy.
After all, it would be pretty strange if no transgender person ever changed their mind about transitioning to their originally preferred gender. Just as it would be very odd if no gay person ever turned out to be more heterosexual than they originally thought they were. Gender identity, like sexual orientation, is very definite and permanent for most people but more ambiguous or fluid for others. (And social disapproval/prejudice is also a powerful factor pressuring transgender people as well as homosexuals to be unhappy about acknowledging or accepting their “abnormality”.)
Yes, it would be unusual as Kimstu pointed out for there not to be. The link Kimstu made was to a very old study, something from the Middle Ages of transsexualism, so to speak. I’ve done a more recent meta-review here, where among the total of perhaps 4,000 transsexual persons studied (with some duplication between studies, of course) the rate of de-transition is about 2-3%.
In my personal and professional life I’ve met or been in close contact with more than 1,000 transgender persons. I would say the rate of de-transition is likely about 20-30 out of that group. But the important thing to note is, only in one case was that due to a confusion over gender identity. The normal reason for a de-transitioning is rather sad - unemployment, loss of family, and a generally shitty life. Last night I was talking to a close friend of mine, coincidentally, who was considering de-transition. She was once the national manager of marketing for a big Pharam company, and last year at a company conference where she was awarded “salesman of the year” for about the 5th straight year. After the conference, she finally came out to her boss as transgender, and laid out this entire plan for how it would work out and how she would keep on performing as she had, and kicking butt for the company.
Twenty days later, she was fired. For the reason “we’re eliminating your position, suddenly and without notice.” She has been unemployed for 12 months now, and is about 2 months from not being able to make her mortgage payment. So she’s said to me “Una…I don’t want to lose my house. If what it takes is putting back on the suit and tie, taking that male name back, and killing off what I really am…I don’t want to lose my house.” She already lost her wife, much of her family, and many friends as a result of her transition, and yeah, things don’t look good.
Transition won’t cure a fucked-up life, nor will it promise you a good life.
Being allowed to use the facilities for your gender is a right. If we forced a woman to use a man’s bathroom, we’d be violating her rights. Transgendered people are real and it is generally accepted that they are the gender they identify with, therefore they should be allowed to use their preferred locker room
It IS what is happening here. We’re talking about MTF or FTM transgendered student being forced by the school to use one or the other locker room.
I would answer that with a question: what steps would you deem sufficient to validate their desire to be identified with the opposite sex and allow them to use that locker room?
I didn’t mean to suggest that the case cited in the OP was of the sort I described (of a non-trans boy claiming to be trans in order to get into the girls’ locker room); I was asking the question generally - what stops a boy from engaging in such a con? I know that when I was in high school, guys would have done some pretty outrageous things just to see what was going on in the girls’ locker room, much less to have physical access.
How can you state that so unequivocally? Are you sure that no boy has pulled that particular scam? And even if you’re correct, that may only be because the rights of trans teens to use the locker room of choice hasn’t yet been widely established. If it becomes universal that a person with male sexual equipment who regards himself as female can use the girls’ locker room, it doesn’t seem at all unlikely to me that some boys are going to take advantage of the situation in that way.
I can’t think of anyone in my high school in Northern Idaho that would have pretended to be a transsexual female just to get a chance to sneak a peak in the girl’s locker room-it would have been outrageously stupid and possibly outrageously dangerous.
The reasoning seems simple -
[ul][li]Everyone can decide for him/her/it/themselves what his/her/its/their gender is.[/li][li]People have an inherent right to use whatever locker room is most appropriate to his/her/its/their gender.[/li][li]I have determined that my gender is “person with a penis who should use the girls’ locker room”.[/li][li]Obviously the girls’ locker room is most appropriate for that gender.[/li][li]Ergo I must be allowed to use the girl’s locker room, and no other.[/ul][/li]You said it might be stupid or dangerous. Are you saying that the teachers and/or students would have conspired to deprive someone of his/her/its/their gender rights? How transphobic.
How condescending. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think I was bisexual, but I knew damn well to play it “straight” 100% of the time in that town. This imaginary problem of boys pretending to be transsexual just to get a peak in the girl’s locker room, with all the backlash that would ensue, has got to one of the most asinine things I have ever heard of. “Gee, I can either see shitloads of free porn on the internet…or I can ruin my reputation for a chance to see some naked girls. Which shall I do??”
You ever see the algebra puzzle that “proves” 1=2 ?
It’s got five or six steps starting with setting a=b, and it ends up with 1=2, with each step seemingly a legitimate exercise of some algebraic property. But a closer examination reveals that one of the steps involves dividing each side by (a-b) – normally unremarkable, but if a=b, then a-b=0, and dividing by zero is undefined, which makes each subsequent step similarly invalid.
In your exegesis above, the “divide by zero” step is “my gender is ‘person with a penis who should use the girls’ locker room.'” That’s not really an option on the table, and it’s the result of the fallacy of equivocation you offered when you said, “Everyone can decide for him/her/it/themselves what his/her/its/their gender is.”
Taken one way, yes, that’s a true statement. But this framework is limited, not infinite. It supports a person whose body does not match his perception of what he is; it does not allow me to be a “person with a penis who doesn’t have to pay sales tax,” any more than it allows me to be a “person with a penis who should use the girls’ locker room.”
There may well be some legitimate parade of horribles associated with permitting trans girls from using the girls’ locker room in high school. I agree, for example, that we cannot necessarily order the crowd of cis girls who are uncomfortable with the prospect to simply shut up and deal with it. But your argument is off the rails. It’s unfair. Cut it out, please, and address the points your opponents are making.
In what way is the transgender student in the OP not claiming a gender of “person with a penis who should be allowed to use the girls’ locker room”? What, specifically, is it about that student’s claim that makes it legitimate, but not anyone else’s?
Like its been mentioned before, you’d have to go through a lot to get validated. Its not like how Huckabee so flippantly put it when he said they’ll accommodate him if he simply “felt like a woman” that day. So I’m not going to put any thought into worrying about how a boy can get himself gender reassigned simply to use the girls’ locker or vice versa. If that happens, we can deal with it, but right now you’re a solution in search for a problem