Objection: assumes facts not in evidence.
Being transgender alone does not constitute a mental health condition. Dysphoria is the culprit. If people could transition at will The Culture style there would be zero confusion on this point.
The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated.
The classic examples of these are bathrooms and athletics. Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity. It sure feels like intolerance when this choice is denied from trans people.
I don’t know your own personal views, but it’s certainly not the case that “the vast majority of people” are aligned with trans people on the above issues.
I know I'm not the first person ever one to bring this up, but it's unclear to me how letting someone with (largely) the physique of a man compete against women is acceptable.
There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female, and that reason still overall holds for someone who is trans. There's a lot of gray area here depending on if and when they undertook HRT, sure, but labelling this as "intolerance" is not right in my book.
This division is arbitrary. The reason for this is the premise of fair competition that identical people should compete. Yet white males dominate male swimming whereas black males dominate male sprinting. There have been physiological explanations. Knowing that, why don't we split the competitions accordingly? It's easy to see that the whole premise of fair competition is very naïve: where do you stop? What are the criteria for determining if competitors are "identical enough"? Choosing these criteria will be a political choice. Transgender people in sports are disturbing the status quo, but they just made apparent the inherent instability of the thing.
Now i don't know about you, but when i personally do sports, for one i'm not good enough that physiological characteristics make the greatest differences: this problem mostly appears when we reach the limits, by "optimal training". Second, i'm usually playing for entertainment which means that i will mostly play to be part of a good game, show off and see nice skill displays, and share this experience with other people, some of them with different levels of training and physical capabilities.
I just wanted to say that this thread is imho unrelated to the issue of transgender and more to the fact that competitive sports is broken and the political struggle between professional and amateur sport.
what the hell, how is Men's and Women's sports categorization arbitrary? its clearly defined who plays in which category.
No, actually the reason is that it makes both watching and competing more interesting. A competition where women never got anywhere near first place would mean women would simply stop showing up (or vice versa). A boxing championship with no weight classes would mean no lightweight boxers would sign up.
On the other hand, with enough subcategories you can get to the point where some competitors win by default, or where you have championships of one or two matches.
So no, it's not arbitrary to separate competitors by some physical characteristics and not others. There are practical reasons to do so that are unrelated to the whims of organizers.
If we remove the gender division from, say, javelin throwing (random choice; current difference in world records there is currently 30% for reference). Now there won't be any (cis) women competing at the top level any more.
So somebody goes ahead and creates a women's division (or whatever you want to call it). Should we somehow forbid this? Or would it be required that they accept any transgender individual in any state of transition? And either case is just "back to square 1" - no cis women have a chance. I don't see how "let's remove the 'women' category in this competition in the interest of fairness to trans people" is improving things for anyone...
This is an interesting one.
I definitely find being told I have to accept that "trans women are women" off putting and like the Aesop's fable with the wind and the sun, it feels like the wind blowing and makes me want to hold on to that jacket tighter.
The way I see it, trans women are trans women, and trans men are trans men. They occupy a different category in my mind than either.
I'm trying to imagine how I would feel going to either bathroom as a trans person, and the only answer I can come up with is "riddled with anxiety".
It's a dangerous path you appear to be on - asking women, almost exclusively, to share their traditionally safe spaces with people they consider to be men.
Attacking people on these two points will be an attack that is almost exclusively on women, and society doesn't tolerate that.
Men, on the whole, aren't going to get bent out of shape if women come into their bathrooms or want to compete with them on the field. It's women who want the separate bathrooms, and women who want to compete athletically with other women.
Given the prevalence of sexual violence in our society and the difficulty of getting an appropriate response, I find this statement incredibly ironic. (Out of context, I admit, but it's hard to reconcile the two views.)
#MeToo is one source of evidence that society absolutely tolerates attacks on women.
[1] No citations - live your own life, do your own reading, make your own conclusions.
>
> #MeToo is one source of evidence that society absolutely tolerates attacks on women.
Isn't that evidence that society doesn't tolerate these things? Once it was out in the open, society rushed to condemn it. Everywhere. Everyone.
It could only happen when society did not know about it. When it was kept secret.
Society absolutely does not tolerate attacks on women, as the #MeToo movement showed.
Who says so? What has been your personal experience with "the transgender community"? If you're seeing it through the polarized lens of online (specifically big platforms) interaction, then for sure you are seeing it as intolerant. But the same could be said about almost every pov online: most of what we get to see widely is vocal, shallow, unsubstantiated takes. Because that's what get viral.
So for one, there is no such thing as a "transgender community". There are most surely publicized simplified canons of what a transgender person is like, just like there is for "the average white dude", "the academic leftist", "the trump fan" or "the new age craftsy person". The thing is, there are very few person actually like that and the one that are, are usually like that because of tremendous influence of online platforms on their views.
All in all, with all respect, i think you are fighting a strawman. Personally, my course of action in this matter (shallowness, simplifications and argumentative intolerance getting more widespread) is not to fight against it for people you disagree with, because they for sure won't listen to you, but to fight against it for people you actually agree with. This is the thing: in every of these "communities" you describe (transgender, religious, could be anything) there is actually little internal cohesion and there are different political ideals interacting. I prefer to put my own house in order. In fact that's the only thing i can meaningfully impact.
I am a lesbian woman and in a gay dating app I have been receiving dozens of death threats and I was even banned after I got reported by a group of people because I put this sentence in those exact words in my profile:
“I support LGBTQ+ rights and I am a proud member of this wonderfully vibrant community. I welcome all transgender people and count many as my friends. However, without causing anyone upset I would like to state that I am only interested in dating female bodied women and I would kindly ask everyone to respect my sexual preferences.”
I’ve been a lesbian for 39 years and I never felt this hated and attacked by any other group of people. I am not saying that transgender people attack me, but it’s transgender activists (often men who identify as men) who say the most vile and nasty things to me because of my sexual preference which I tried to express in the most respectful way.
I doubt that is the main reason. Society has been pretty clear for a long time that certain people found trans people too strange to accept them. Gay people have been treated the same way. I think most people that don’t like trans people are probably also uncomfortable with gay people even if they are more likely to say it’s okay to be gay.
> If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot.
You can avoid being called a bigot by understanding the following basic concepts.
Sex and gender are two distinct ideas. Gender as described by Judith Butler is a kind of performance that you do. It starts in childhood where we give boys the color blue and toy trucks and we give girls the color pink and dolls. Men wear pants and never wear dresses and women wear dresses and skits and use a purse. A man never wears a purse and if he has anything close it’s called a bag, definitely not a purse.
The above are made up concepts. Clothes and bags and pink and blue are not biological reality, they’re just made up by society. They’re part of a performance of gender. You can change your gender just by changing your performance.
Sex is a biological concept that relates to what secondary sex characteristics your body presents. Hormone levels, genitals, etc. this is still don’t a binary concept as intersex people exist and are something like 1% of the population. It’s also unclear if someone completely changes their hormones and has surgery to change their genitals, what is the point of saying “you’re still a man”? Such a statement is likely to bring up feelings of pain and misery the person has had from people who have been intolerant towards them. It also is unclear if you’re referring to biological sex or gender, and trans people are often terrified that they’re not performing their gender properly.
It’s like going up to a fat person and saying “wow you’re fat” and then walking around saying “fat people are intolerant because they get upset when I call them fat”. Maybe on some level you’re right, but you’re being an asshole if you insist on saying that. And again, if a trans person has severely changed their sex hormones, the concept of “sex never changes” is shaky anyway.
So stop trying to tell trans women they’re really men. Such a statement completely misses all the subtle realities of such a statement, serves no productive purpose, and is rude as hell.
You don't actually believe this is what defines men and women do you? If so, wow. That is incredibly, regressively sexist.
> And again, if a trans person has severely changed their sex hormones, the concept of "sex never changes" is shaky anyway.
A male taking medication to increase his estrogen and reduce his testosterone level, for example, is just a male taking medication. He hasn't converted himself to female. There is no change of sex, this is nonsense.
> So stop trying to tell trans women they're really men. Such a statement completely misses all the subtle realities of such a statement, serves no productive purpose, and is rude as hell.
Of course they're men: transwomen are by definition men who want to be women. The purpose of keeping this in mind is when they try to demand access to female-only spaces, instead of pretending they are women, we can tell them NO.
> A male taking medication to increase his estrogen and reduce his testosterone level, for example, is just a male taking medication. He hasn't converted himself to female. There is no change of sex, this is nonsense.
The complete lack of self-awareness here is comical.
> > So stop trying to tell trans women they're really men. Such a statement completely misses all the subtle realities of such a statement, serves no productive purpose, and is rude as hell.
> Of course they're men: transwomen are by definition men who want to be women. The purpose of keeping this in mind is when they try to demand access to female-only spaces, instead of pretending they are women, we can tell them NO.
I think you'll find it's a little bit more complicated than that.
How? A man doesn't become a woman by wearing dresses and skirts and using a purse, and he doesn't become female by messing around with his hormone levels.
He's still a man, still male, whatever his desires to the contrary. Anything else is simply a fiction that the rest of us are being told to participate in.
Come on! You can do better! I believe in you!
Look, if a man wants to wear dresses or take estrogen or call himself a woman, that's fine, he can do what he likes. But whatever he does, he's not and will never be a woman, because he is male. Women are female, not some idea in a man's head.
Let's not ignore millions of years of evolutionary history just to spare the feelings of a few cross-dressers.
But you're not even trying to argue this or convince anyone of anything. You're just saying "nuh huh. What I believe in true and applies to everyone whether they like it or not".
I'm guessing there's nothing out there that'll change your mind. You've taken a fundamentalist position, which begs the question why are you here?
> You're just saying "nuh huh. What I believe in true and applies to everyone whether they like it or not".
Kind of ironic considering that's what the trans activists are insisting women must submit to, regarding all the men invading their spaces.
Replace "men" and "women" with "black" and "white" and read your stuff again.
Why is that different?
What clothes you wear are part of a performance where the entirety of the performance represents your gender. But not your sex! Changing one thing doesn’t change your gender. But if you change the whole performance, that’s changing your gender. And I don’t really like these concepts of gender, but it’s more of a description of how society views a person. I never got called “ma'am” or “miss” until I started wearing dresses. I’m not really saying that wearing a dress makes you a woman, but I’m saying that wearing a dress and doing the other things makes other people read you as a woman.
Until you’re able to separate the two concepts of sex and gender in your mind you’re going to continue to run in to this issue.
When someone says “trans women are women, not men” they’re talking about gender, not sex. And gender as theorized by Judith Butler is something that we can easily change. Whether we can change sex is a different question and one I’m less qualified to discuss, but it’s irrelevant to the question of changing gender.
Also I'm not convinced that a man being called "ma'am" or "miss" necessarily means that the speaker thinks he's a woman, especially these days. They might be saying it because that's how you're expected to politely address men in dresses these days. Or perhaps, they are being quietly sarcastic about the whole thing.
In summary, I don't accept this Butlerian redefinition of woman, as it's incoherent with reality and relies on guessing what's going on in people's minds. The existing definition of adult human female is fine and there's no need to change it.
This is the same stance that I have on various religions. If this is bigoted, so be it.
All you're saying is, you don't want non-passing people allowed in the wrong restrooms. Which, is... it's just a strange thing to want, really.
The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.
If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot. It completely misrepresents the definition of tolerance. Tolerance can only exist in a state of disagreement. If we all agree on something then we have nothing to tolerate. Tolerance is really the act of people accepting that some men want to live their lives like women without actually believing themselves that these men are women. That is tolerance and therefore anyone should be allowed to hold the opinion that trans women are not women but that’s okay because we’re still cool in calling you a female name and complimenting you if you wear a nice dress.
It’s like with religion. It’s perfectly fine to tell a hardcore christian person that you think god doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make you a bigot, just a human being with an opinion. As long as we still let people live their own experiences without fear or discrimination then we don’t all have to believe in the same god. It’s the same about gender ideology. The trans community needs to accept that only because they feel they are something that it doesn’t mean everyone feels that way about them. The vast majority of people have no issue with transgender individuals. They just know that a man with a mental health condition is in principle still a man and we shouldn’t be ostracised to state truths like this.