In both cases, a minority of people have non-mainstream feelings/understanding of their own gender or sexuality, and therefore wish to do things that affect their own body and either nobody else's (trans) or that only affect other people who feel the same way (gay). In both cases, people have argued that it's immoral, that it's about grooming children, and that the external visibility of being gay/trans - either seeing two people of the same gender holding hands, or kissing, or choosing to live their life together openly, or seeing someone who you once thought was one gender but has asked to be called the other gender and to be allowed to dress and act as culture considers "normal" for that gender.
In both cases, it turns out that actually, no, these gay or trans (or any combination of the LGBTQ - many trans people identify as trans AND gay, it's not a case of gay people choosing to be trans to become straight as I've seen claimed) people roaming the streets doesn't make your life worse, it doesn't trick kids into thinking about sex too early any more than a married straight couple bringing a new baby into the world does, and telling kids that it's OK to be gay, and that it's OK to be trans, doesn't lead to more kids "deciding" to be gay or trans it just leads to more people admitting it rather than staying in the closet. Trans kids and gay kids aren't making a decision, any more than you never made a decision to be your birth gender, nor did you make a decision to be gay or not.
Trans rights are human rights, and while I'm not trans if I decided tomorrow to get surgery to remove my penis and ask everyone to call me "she/her", how exactly does that affect you or anybody else any more than if I continue to have the gay sex I so often enjoy?
There was an event recently in the news where the organiser of a lesbian speed dating event had to specify that it is strictly female-only. The reason was that heterosexual males (who called themselves women) had attended previous such events, despite lesbian women of course not being interested in them, and were being creepy. Trans activists complained to the venue and ended up getting her event shut down. Simply because lesbians wanted a female-only space to themselves, in accordance with their sexual orientation.
Here's what the organiser wrote about this situation:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/03/trans-activists-shu...
Another example is from Australia, where their Human Rights Commission have banned lesbian women from holding female-only events, refusing to granting them an exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act because it would again exclude heterosexual males who call themselves women:
https://reduxx.info/australian-human-rights-commission-decis...
The clash of rights here is clear, lesbian women who want female-only spaces to meet other women of the same sexual orientation are being denied this because some males demand to be included. These lesbian women are being compelled to accept the false belief that such males are female or women.
Regarding your final paragraph - if you decided have a surgeon remove/reshape your penis (which isn't even a requirement by trans activist standards - most trans-identifying males don't do this) and ask everyone to refer to you as 'she' or 'her' then that in itself isn't an issue. But that's not actually what's happening. People have been fired from their jobs, harassed by trans activists, even arrested and charged for not calling these males 'she' and 'her'. So that's also how it can affect people.
You could say the exact same thing about people being fired for racism or homophobia and being "harassed" (I wouldn't use that word for fighting bigotry, personally) for being racist or homophobic. Is that evidence that racism should be allowed everywhere?
> The reason was that heterosexual males (who called themselves women) had attended previous such events, despite lesbian women of course not being interested in them, and were being creepy.
There is literally no evidence of this being a common thing, while there is quite a bit of evidence of nutty anti-trans people accusing cis women of being trans because they "looked manly", even though they were just women born looking like that. Meanwhile, the idea that male sex offenders would rather pretend to be female to gain access to private spaces (where if they start doing anything creepy, they can be kicked out by the majority regardless of whether the majority can tell what their birth gender is or not) as opposed to doing what actual sexual abusers do, which is using strength and or manipulation in one on one situations, not joining women-only groups for the opportunity.
It's all just fear mongering lies by a minority of bigots who hate gays just as much as trans people, which are then believed by another minority of people who believe the bigots really do have women's interests at heart. Statistics don't show that people who claim to be trans are more likely than people who don't to sexually offend, and in fact the vast majority of sexual offenses are committed by straight, cis men who aren't trans nor are pretending to be trans. And that fear of "men" can translate into fear of women who were born as men, even though statistically they're less likely to be sexual abusers.
"One transwoman pushed himself against a lesbian in the toilets, and another, clad in purple lycra, was sporting a visible erection."
(https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/men-dont-belong-at-lesbi...)
It should be obvious why she needed to explicitly point out that her events are female-only after that sort of behaviour from the heterosexual males who were intruding. And why these incidents, and the reaction she got from furious trans activists after standing up for the sexual orientation of herself and other lesbian women, has driven her to open a private members club for lesbian women where they can rightfully exclude any and all males.
She's fighting homophobia, yet is accused of being a bigot for doing so.
Do see what I mean by this, and similar such incidents, being examples of a clash of rights?
> > People have been fired from their jobs, harassed by trans activists
> You could say the exact same thing about people being fired for racism or homophobia and being "harassed" (I wouldn't use that word for fighting bigotry, personally) for being racist or homophobic. Is that evidence that racism should be allowed everywhere?
That comparison doesn't make sense. Is it racist to state, for instance, that Rachel Dolezal isn't black?
If people don't believe that men become women by announcing that they are women, then why would they call such a man 'she' and 'her'? Makes no sense does it.
Your argument is like claiming it's Islamophobic and bigoted to state that Mohammed wasn't any sort of prophet and that the Quran is not actually a divine revelation. If you don't believe it then you shouldn't have to act like you do believe it.
Frances' flooding of media outlets around that time was sort of strange in certain ways. He seemed to correctly identify potential problems in the mental healthcare system but then had this idea that changing things in the DSM to address some of its issues would make everything worse. It felt as if he was co-opting concerns everyone was having to argue for not changing anything at all, and in the process turned everything on its head.
The DSM is a very political document with a lot of interest groups involved at all levels, which is why it didn't change even more than it did. As a result, you had NIMH circumvent the whole process with RDoC, which then in turn seems to have had a relatively short life (maybe?) associated with changeover in its own administration.
It feels as if everyone has their own schema for thinking about mental illness, and the whole field moves along without any serious consequences. There's probably a lot of reasons for this, including scientific and medical sociology, and the complexity of mental wellness and illness as a domain. But it makes me wonder if some of the distinctions that are argued to be critical are really that critical in the end.