I know that many conservatives operate in bad faith, but still... why can't anyone just say that a woman is an adult human female? Oh right, saying that would Empower the Cons, and we can't have that.
I haven't followed trans issues as closely as some, but I agree when you say that many progressives mistakenly believe that this fight is exactly like gay marriage and that it's easy. It's not. There's way thornier questions here, the sports question being a good example.
And finally, I don't think J.K. Rowling (who is left wing on many, many things) is a vicious monster. There. I said it.
Have you seen the Matt Walsh documentary "What is A Woman?" It's something that's probably being watched and passed around way, way more than the total silence in the press would lead people to believe. Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog were some of the only open-minded liberal types I know of that watched it, reviewed it, and gave it a fair shake. Is Walsh's film a right wing polemic? Mostly yes, but the salient issue about it is that it's not at all crazy, and most sensible people — which is most people, beyond political affiliation — are pretty chilled by what's in it.
Lefty/liberal types (and I'd argue the Hillary Clinton/K-Hive/"Colbert'n'Stewart, who'll kill comedy forever" types are not in any way liberal or left at this point, just bitterly partisan for uber-corporate, technocratic, PMC worship) would have been smart to get ahead of this issue by not totally blackballing/isolating/tarring/libeling/slandering the aforementioned Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog's early work on some of the more sensitive parts of the trans issue. When I saw the Walsh film, I kept thinking that someone not blinded by empty partisanship could have produced a similar documentary with that duo at the helm years ago — who, unlike Walsh, don't ultimately maybe think that any gender care should outlawed altogether. Had that alternate reality version of the film been made, we could have maybe prevented this current morass, which is one of a few issues maybe serious and stupid enough to remove all (formerly) liberal parties from power in the west for a generation, with likely wildly reactionary replacements.
We're in a place where this is in no way related to the gay and lesbian marriage issue. Most sensible people, and even many of the evangelicals deeply opposed to that issue on religious grounds, could at least understand, or even empathize, with the argument as a question of pure equality. The trans issue has become so cultish that it makes Scientology seem radically normal, with a bizarre set of beliefs and language regulations that's making seniors and independents repelled by Trump's behavior rethink voting against him again. If you go deep into Mississippi and talk to religious conservative types (and I sometimes do, and they're mostly very nice and smart people!), most of them will even agree that trans folk should be free to live the way they want to live, without harassment or discriminatory laws, but this argument is totally untethered from the issue of simple "equality" at this point.
That famous and sensible liberal types like J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle have somehow become the new face of "transphobia" for honest and often thoughtful work — that dares to question a bizarre and byzantine belief set that changes its rules daily, like the fundamentalist pseudo-religion on heavy psychedelic drugs that it is — shows how wild this has become. I have a lot of friends in my little corner of NYC that bridge multiple generations, and are life-long professed socialists that worked for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, are discussing how terrifying a lot of this is in private, and how their non-profit work has mostly (as described in that recent Ryan Grim piece) become lengthy Zoom meetings about language policing and pronouns.
It's such a shame. I was once a big fan of Jon Stewart (and the now-dead world of late night comedy in general). He can be really funny (still!), but our broken-brained modernity has shown him to be a dim bulb, with no principles or voice of his own. A typical affliction these days, yes, but it's a shame to see Stewart affected by it. We could use someone like the old Stewart to come at this issue with wisdom and empathy and sharply pointed humor, but that Stewart would probably be banned by Twitter.
Perhaps much of what is called "conservative" policy measures is unduly authoritarian and butts in on decision-making territory that usually is best occupied by the patient and his or her physician, but there is now too much evidence that our medical establishment has gone so far down the ideological rabbit hole that a gaping void exists when it comes to The Science. Like our educational institutions, our scientific institutions have become so thoroughly corrupted that the discovery of good quality evidence through open debate between competing theories is not happening . . . Lysenkoism is occurring under an informal regime of "cancel culture," together with the inevitable prioritization of politics above knowledge-creation because the sources of its funding have been over-centralized and placed largely under the control of the state.
If you haven't already, perhaps spend some time listening to experts in their field who will tell you how far the institutions our societies rely on for "the science" have abandoned their founding principles . . . things are bad. Quacks and Zealots are donning white coats and browbeating everyone to "believe in Science," and now too much of the "leadership" in our countries are acting as if they're in a Cargo Cult.
How Gender Activists Dictate "Standards of Care" | with Stella O'Malley
You are still conflating DSDs (Differences in Sexual Development (examples Klinefelter and androgen insensitivity syndrome)- sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as Intersex) with transgender in your otherwise common sense paragraph about how the left should address this issue.
The people who "don't fit neatly" into male or female are not the people who are "transgender" and medicalizing at new and unheard of rates (also flipped from majority male born to female born recently). See the recent Reuters article about the increases of the last few years.
The issue of DSDs is a separate issue.
The issue of trans identifying people (particularly teens) is mostly people who are 100% one sex, but identify with the "gender identity" of the other sex. They believe altering their body via hormones and/or surgery will help them deal with that congruence. For some it does, and for adults most think they should be allowed to do what they need to do to be happy. But with teens we don't know if that is something they will grow out of, we have started affirming all "questioning" kids which leads to a medicalized path.
Prior to the rise of "affirmation only" of kids who identify as the opposite gender (identity) from their sex, we had a model of "watchful waiting." Under watchful waiting, many teens would desist from the gender incongruance and live in their natal sex. At rates above 80%. I suspect the Arkansas AG was referencing that (not some fabled 98% de-transition rate that you correcty point out is nonsense). When given time and actually going through the puberty of their natal sex many kids will desist. This allows them to live in their healthy body. Currently we can't tell the difference.
See the growing number of actual detransitioners to see that this is true.
We are rushing kids onto this path.
Dems have to take the feet off the gas on this.
Not to mention the plainly insane idea that a male *is* a woman based on Self-ID (simply identifying himself as such). This is the basis for the argument that sports and prisons should be segregated by "gender identity" rather than sex. This is already in place at the highschool sports level all over the country and making its way into higher level sports (obviously the Lia Thomas case, but also see many instances of males winning in women's categories in biking and a male just won a women's surfing competition in Australia, one year after winning the men's). It ridiculous. It completely decimates all good will that most people feel about allowing people to be who they want to be.
Don't make me lie and say a man *is* a woman.
Interestingly - the military did just state trans women, who are born male (redundant, but I guess they had to be clear) must register for the draft and trans men, who are born female, do not.
Meanwhile the same administration supports the aforementioned allowing natal born males into women's sports and prisons based on "gender identity."
Dem's are losing some of us on this. I'm still voting dem, but I can't get myself to give money and knock doors like I used to.
Jeff, you ignored the largest right-wing objection in this, which is the relationship between kids, the parents, and the state.
You might consider some of these teachers simply well-meaning woke people who are trying to help kids find their way. Certainly the left does, and considers counseling kids on their personal transgender questions to be a free speech issue.
The problem is that the other side sees it as a state versus the individual issue, which is made even more stark when legislation permits all of this to be done behind the parents' back. The left's arrogant assumption that their "experts" - i.e. an army of 30 something purple haired single childless women from Vassar - know more about someone's kids than the people that actually raise them rankles people more than the left appreciates. The left truly does not get this.
Maybe this will make more sense with a story.
Little Johnny is a boy who doesn't play sports well. The other boys tend to pick him last for a game of kickball and he feels ignored and depressed. He spends some time playing with the girls, fits in, and then thinks "maybe I should have been a girl." He voices this opinion to the teacher, who encourages it.
Suddenly, little Johnny is a rockstar. Virtue-signaling moms and teachers fall all over themselves to validate little Johnny's new persona. Johnny comes home and tells his parents at dinner that he heard about puberty blockers and wants to take them. Johnny's parents call the principal demanding to know what the fuck are they telling their kid, and the principal tells them that according to state law, this is none of their business.
The double standard is also telling. A 12 year old cannot drink, smoke, get a job, get a tattoo, vote, drive a car, etc because pre-teens don't have that judgement yet. But, according to the left, he can cut off his tallywacker.
"There’s sex, and then there’s gender. Sex involves biological attributes — chromosomes, hormone levels, that kind of stuff. There are anomalies in sex such as Klinefelter syndrome (chromosomes are XXY) and androgen insensitivity syndrome (the body makes testosterone but doesn’t respond to it) that make sex not completely binary. Therefore, sex is basically meaningless and can be ignored. Gender is all that matters. Gender refers to socially-constructed gender roles — playing with dolls if you’re a girl, playing with trucks if you’re a boy, that type of thing. A person chooses their gender identity, so when a person identifies with a gender, they ARE that gender, end of story.
I feel that that’s a fair summation of left-wing canon on this issue."
Your feelings, while understandable, are false...or at least not quite accurate. The position you laid out amounts to the genderists' own Intelligent Design argument -- a bunch of watered-down PR-tested pablum meant to sow just enough doubt into the average layperson's mind that they do not see the insipid and broken theology underlying the activists' zeal. It may be the momentary *consensus* among the professional and managerial class who mean well and are terrified of losing their jobs because they said the wrong thing within earshot of a blue-haired weirdo, but it is not the left-wing canon. The left-wing canon, instead, amounts to this:
1. Everyone is born with a gender identity which is something between a soul and a mental faculty, and which is the most central thing about their identity as a human being. Man, woman, male, female, non-binary, and a whole host of other sex-and-gender labels exclusively refer to a person's gender identity, not to the sex of their physical body.
2. This gender identity may correlate to a biological sex, or it may not. When it does, it may correlate to the sex of one's physical body, or to the opposite sex. When it does not, it may be the null gender (commonly known as "agender"), one of an infinite set of "non-binary" genders (which may exist between or orthogonal to the poles of male and female), or a multi-gender which asserts different aspects at different times. Some gender identities have so little to do with a human body that it is difficult to understand how the two concepts could have ever been related, but even in these cases, it remains a vital part of a person's overall identity.
3. A person's gender identity is fixed from conception, and only belatedly discovered. Once discovered, refusal to acknowledge this gender identity causes the individual extreme distress, the only proper treatment for which is to have everyone the person ever meets affirm their gender identity at all times and in all places (e.g., pronouns are not "preferred", they are correct) and to "pause" a prepubescent child's puberty until a doctor can schedule them for a "gender-affirming" surgery.
4. The way someone expresses their gender (i.e., their gender expression) -- in particular their manner of dress, the cadence and depth of their voice, their hobbies and interests, their propensity for wearing makeup or other ornaments, etc. -- is only loosely correlated with their underlying gender identity. Therefore it is impossible to know in advance whether anyone is a man, woman, male, female, both, or neither.
5. Sexual arousal (i.e., what we have only briefly started calling a person's "sexuality") is almost exclusively governed by a combination of gender expression and gender identity, not by a prospective partner's biological sex. In particular, a person's genitalia should have no bearing upon their viability as a sexual partner to another, as long as both parties have compatible sexualities under the umbrella of gender identity -- so two gay men should not have a problem having sex, even if one (or both) of these men has a vagina (mutatis mutandis gay women/penis).
6. Failure to continuously affirm and evince adherence to all of the above is a sign either of gender heresy or gender blasphemy, which are brought under the common label of "transphobia".
There are doubtless other points I have missed, but this is the bare minimum one must acknowledge in order to avoid the stink of transphobia. This is the ideology lurking beneath your later suggestion of "hey sometimes people are born with weird stuff, and sometimes when a girl is a tomboy it REALLY DOES mean she's actually maybe a boy inside, but there should be some kind of line between shuffling every tomboy into a gender clinic and not having gender clinics at all".
You also err in that transgender people (at least in the West) lack protections; in America and Canada and across the entire European Union, transgender people have protections for employment and housing and basic human dignity. What "protection" they do not yet have is the universal right to force everyone to publicly and privately affirm the dogma I laid out, though in some places they have come mightily close to achieving this.
It is a religious dogma, no less potent and no less toxic to the thinking mind than the Abrahamist faiths to which most of us are accustomed. The muddling contradictions and absurdities that obtain from the affirmation of this faith are not its death knell; they are an inevitable consequence of its nature, which is based in the gathering of social power through the enforcement and propagation of a shared belief. The fact that this belief runs counter to reality does not weaken the belief -- it makes expressions of the belief all the more impactful.
Jeff, you are wrong about the Arkansas bill: it is not terrible, it is absolutely essential, and needs to be copied nationwide.
You say "It takes what should be a personal decision between a young person and their parents — advised by medical professionals — and hands the decision-making power to the state. It’s fucked up; nobody should have the state butting into their medical decisions."
First of all, as a general principle, the state butts into medical decisions ALL THE TIME, for the excellent reason of preventing bad and dangerous medicine. For example, your doctor can only prescribe FDA approved medication. And this is almost always a good thing!
In the case of "gender affirmation", the medical community has (very sadly and tragically) gone totally off the rails. "Gender affirmation" is NOT evidence based, as unbiased reviews in other countries have clearly shown.
Matt Osborne at The Distance, substack of LGB United, put it well:
>Hundreds of families were told that their children would kill themselves without “gender affirmation.” This is a lie. It has always been a lie.
>There is no science to back it up and the best long-term study [link in original] shows a manifold INCREASE in suicide risk among the POST-transition population.
>Jazz Jennings has a far greater risk of suicide today than if his body had been left alone.
" systematic review highlights that 61–98% of children and young people who present with gender dysphoria, without medical intervention, desist (Ristoria and Steensma, 2016). That is, naturally stop opposite sex identification and reconcile themselves to their natal sex. "
As an atheist I don't see the conservative position on this issue as having anything to do with religion. Occasionally the state gets involved in decisions between a minor and their parents, for example growing up in California I couldn't get a tattoo at 16 even with parental permission. I generally oppose that, but there does seem to be a trend at the moment where general teen angst and body image issues are being pushed as gender dysphoria. And since there seems to be issues with the use of puberty blockers in regards to the effects on future fertility and sexual health it does seem to be a net positive to ban them for minors
The cons are not wrong about the need for heavy safeguards when it comes to gender dysphoria and kids. All the shit coming out about Mermaids in the UK is horrifying. Including an employee in a child protective services org donning rubber and masturbating on camera in the bathroom at work.
Unfortunately you're granting far too much good faith here. Most of the driving force for these changes is to throw up a bunch of sand so that the subset of trans-identified people who are adult males motivated by paraphilic fixation have social cover. I recommend reading the very good & short book by Michael Bailey, "The Man Who Would Be Queen", available here:
or the longer and more recent book "Trans" by Helen Joyce, both of which will probably put some jigsaw puzzle pieces in place.
I am quite sympathetic to that group, at least in theory, because in most cases they seem to have had little choice in developing this paraphilia. Unfortunately, most people are not so sympathetic to the idea in the first place, still less to the thought that their acceptance and cooperation with someone's cross-sex presentation in public is actually to further that person's paraphilic gratification. That is why so much chaff has been put up around it, and "trans kids" are ideal for promoting the idea that cross-sex gender identities can be innate, immutable, and essential, which is great cover. And I am not sympathetic to that angle, at all.
For some honest and interesting first-person insights into what I'm talking about here, read some of the threads on this account: https://twitter.com/RecoveringAGP
On the topic of kids, the desistance rate is extremely high and nobody has any way to predict which kids will desist and which will persist. The protocol of social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgeries leads almost inevitably to sterility, very high risk of anorgasmia and sexual dysfunction, not to mention the bone and brain development risks of puberty blockers, and the general-health risks of cross-sex hormones. So given that most kids with early-onset gender dysphoria desist and grow up to be comfortable with their bodies (most of them will be gay), subjecting any of them to an unproven treatment with very serious side effects is unethical. And it is in the interest of the state to prevent children from being subjected to unethical or unproven medical procedures, those that carry serious risks and side effects and have not been proven effective by high-quality evidence.
For the late-onset (usually teen) gender dysphoria crowd, predominantly female, they are a new group with virtually no evidence at all as to what interventions will be effective. I find the theory of James Cantor that they are likely suffering from BPD quite plausible. Treating one psychological disorder with the physical interventions claimed to be appropriate for a completely different disorder is, pardon my language, insane. It is like going to the doctor to complain about psychosomatic fatigue caused by depression and having them prescribe you methamphetamines. Even if it was a good treatment for fatigue (probably not), it sure isn't a good treatment for depression. (Though it might make you feel pretty good for a while, something that is also true of testosterone for teenage girls.)
It is a difficult thing to appreciate that this entire construct might be so much horseshit. There might not be any such thing as gender identity. Many of the prominent individuals arguing passionately for their rights might actually be motivated by a private sexual fantasy, not "a woman's brain in a man's body". The entire phenomenon of trans kids might - outside of the very small number of young children who were known to experience serious gender dysphoria - have no more objective reality than the Indigo Children or the satanic abuse panic.
It sucks to think about. For me it especially sucks since my liberal tribe is all-in on this, and in major media only right-wing nutjobs will bring it up. Unfortunately, "I believe the exact opposite of what Tucker Carlson says about everything" is not a fully reliable guide to everything in the world.
So much that is frustrating comes down to language policing. There are now two distinct definitions of "woman" in the lexicon - an older, more common definition referring to sex, chromosomes, reproductive organs, etc., and a more recent definition referring to gender identity. Both definitions have their uses, and it nearly always obvious which word people mean from context (nobody sane is confused about which definition is meant by the phrase "pregnant women"). The problem is that instead of celebrating the widespread adoption of the latter, more inclusive definition where applicable, the modern left would like to ban the former definition from all usage, despite it's irreplaceable usefulness in describing the basics of human reproduction and sex drive.
Here is what I think has happened with the gender-affirming care for kids debate. I think there are a number of trans activists who knew they were trans at a young age and were unable to access any kind of care when they were young, and thus had very painful childhood and adolescence experiences. They now see these new treatments, and probably correctly surmise that had they been able to access puberty blockers and the like they would have had a much easier childhood and adolescence. Given that lived experience, of course you are going to push hard to maximize access to these treatments - they know it would have helped them and sincerely believe that denying these treatments to anyone is akin to sentencing kids to the same pain they experienced.
But the problem with lived experience is it is YOUR experience. By definition it cannot tell you if your experience was typical or not. As a corollary, lived experience often sets you up for survivor bias: Imagine LeBron James saying “I don’t know why people stress about picking a career, I just played basketball and it worked out for me!”
Today’s trans activists are, almost by definition, those whose gender dysphoria didn’t desist. But that doesn’t mean that experience will be true for every kid, and indeed there is research that greater than 50% of kids who experience dysphoria do eventually desist, and allowing those kids access to permanent changes to their bodies will likely lead to some terrible regret.
It’s just a difficult, painful issue. It’s horrible that states like Texas and Arkansas are trying to aggressively insert themselves in profoundly unhelpful ways. But it also isn’t helpful to call anyone who thinks we might want to be careful with medical interventions anti-trans bigots.
Necessary and sufficient conditions work great for human-created constructs. Are there necessary and sufficient conditions for a card game to be considered "Go Fish"? Yes!
Naturally occurring phenomena don't lend themselves to necessary and sufficient conditions. Is Pluto a planet? What set of qualities should group animals into a phylum? We like to categorize things, but the best we can do is identify a constellation of characteristics that pick out a planet, a phylum of animals, or a woman or man. As you say, we can generally pick out women and men despite exceptions like people with androgen insensitivity. That's why it chaps my ass that conservative play "gotcha" by demanding necessary and sufficient conditions to define a woman, and it equally bugs me that the left insists that there is no constellation of characteristics that generally allow us to identify a woman or a man.
It's adolescent to insist that everything has to be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. Grownups realize that the world is complicated.
If a trans woman has had genital surgery and has been on HRT for a decade or so and living as a woman full-time, then it's pretty much impossible to tell that she is trans and not cis without a DNA test (or asking her, or checking her medical records). It would seem ridiculous to me to refer to her with masculine pronouns or force her to use the men's toilets. That's what I mean when I say "trans women are women".
There are a bunch of things that we can argue about without trying to claim that trans women aren't women: transition is a process, but we have to have binary divisions in a number of cases - if there are men's and women's toilets or changing rooms, then people have to go to one or the other, and they have to change at some point. The correct point at which they should change is something we can debate - having some widely agreed guidelines would really help a lot of people (including many trans people themselves, who may well not want to change on day one, but would like a hint of when they should).
I think a lot of people are reasonably annoyed at the idea that a man can say "I'm a woman now" and walk into the women's facilities everywhere. But (apart from a small number of assholes), that's not what generally happens. At some point they switch. Lots of them go a few months when they just don't go out for long enough that they need to go, so that when they do start going into the women's, lots of people have started treating them as female.
Exactly how sports should work is something else to be legitimately debated - I tend to the view that a lot of sport exists mostly for the fun of playing and for teamwork, rather than being super-competitive (people are still trying to win, of course) and the sort of relatively minor advantages that trans women have over cis women aren't much different to "doing an extra hour a week in the gym" or something - and since most of the people I'm thinking of aren't necessarily doing a full hour in the gym every week, that's just not enough to care about.
At the élite end, then we do need a better scientific study for those trans women who went through male puberty (those that didn't, ie had access to puberty blockers early on, should clearly be allowed to compete; they can't have had any advantages). The questions should be about things like "how much does performance drop, and how quickly?", "can a trans woman who was in heavy training before transition retain muscle mass by training right through?", "how much do things (like bone density) that don't change really matter?" Perhaps the answer will be to require a trans woman to have had low T levels for a certain period, perhaps she will be required to decondition after dropping to low T so when she reconditions, she will have to build muscle mass slowly (like a cis woman) rather than being able to retain what she had from when she had male hormone levels, perhaps some sports will have to have weight classes for safety reasons (combat sports already do, of course; perhaps some non-combat heavy-contact sports like rugby or American football should anyway), perhaps there are a few sports where women who went through a T-based puberty would have to be excluded (I originally wrote "trans" women and "male" puberty in this, but there are cis women who went through a T-based puberty because they mistakenly thought they were trans men and they will have exactly the same advantages as trans women who transitioned after T-based puberty).
And then there are intermediate levels - especially youth sports where trans athletes have had far fewer opportunities to transition, and where "take three years out" amounts to "never compete at all". While élite sports pose the hardest technical/scientific questions, I think these are the hardest ethical questions: If a trans girl comes out at 17, can she switch from the boy's team to the girl's immediately at high school? If not, when can she, how much physical transition does she have to undergo? How much risk are we prepared to put her on if she's still playing on the boy's team? Remember that her physical abilities will be changing as her body changes. Are we prepared to say to her that she has to choose between her sport and her gender? If she will be allowed to compete in the women's NCAA in two years' time when she's transitioned enough, how is she supposed to compete for a scholarship? Obviously, she has advantages if she only started on hormones a few months ago - but she has disadvantages compared to the boys too. If it's an individual sport competed against the environment (golf, running, swimming, etc), then we can just let her record her times/distances and let the college recruiters sort it out to some degree. But we can't do that if she plays a team sport like basketball. Or even an individual sport like tennis. Which team is she on? Who does she compete against? When does she change?
One of the things I really hate about this is that there are lots of people whose fundamental position is: "everyone is born either male or female, this can never change, in any situation where we separate the sexes, they should always go with how they were born" - which is the basic conservative/anti-trans position - who are determined not to just say that. There are also a noisy but quite small chunk of people who think "the moment you say you are a woman, you are a woman in all respects, and anyone objecting to this in any way is an unredeemable bigot". The combination of these makes it nearly impossible for anyone who holds that trans women *can* be treated entirely as women, but that different aspects of that should be granted at different times to get into the details that can make this work.
Changing your name: whenever you like. Changing your pronouns: ask me and I will. Changing which toilet you use: when you'll create less trouble in the women's than the men's, but you go where you want to; that's a recommendation, not a rule. Changing which team you compete on in sport: when it's fair - and that one *is* a rule. The analogy I like to use is adulthood. There isn't some magical difference between 17 years and 364 days and 18 years and zero days - and a bunch of adult rights aren't granted at 18 anyway (e.g. driving can be as young as 14, drinking is 21, etc). Similarly, someone transitioning will get different things at different stages.
Also, too much of this debate, including much of my posting above, ignores trans men.
And non-binary people are, well, non-binary. They were mostly born male or female (some were born intersex). But they transition to being non-binary. Sometimes that's physical, sometimes it isn't. It's surprising how much someone can change your perceptions of them without any physical changes. I don't have all the answers: non-binary sport? I mean, if you're not physically transitioning, why not compete with your birth sex? Toilets: go where suits you or where you feel most comfortable. Maybe having some unsegregated toilets would be a good idea?
I know I don't have all the answers. But I'd like to have some sort of public space to explore the questions without getting attacked by people who are convinced that every single trans person is a terrifying sexual predator.
Another solid base hit - so, thanks! But you may have missed a spot. It might be comically productive to speculate on the potential outcome if more people actually accepted the enlightened new thinking about childhood sexuality and decided to ride that little pony into the future. Since it’s reasonable to assume heteronormative preferences would actually outnumber the brave choices of trailblazing transactivists, we could celebrate the advent of penile enlargement for Pop Warner football players and breast enhancement for Brownies. Sounds great doesn’t it?
Of course it would certainly provide excellent investment opportunities for socially conscious shareholders focussed on healthcare, something that we can expect to extend the arc of history further toward it’s inevitable happy ending.
I know that many conservatives operate in bad faith, but still... why can't anyone just say that a woman is an adult human female? Oh right, saying that would Empower the Cons, and we can't have that.
I haven't followed trans issues as closely as some, but I agree when you say that many progressives mistakenly believe that this fight is exactly like gay marriage and that it's easy. It's not. There's way thornier questions here, the sports question being a good example.
And finally, I don't think J.K. Rowling (who is left wing on many, many things) is a vicious monster. There. I said it.
Have you seen the Matt Walsh documentary "What is A Woman?" It's something that's probably being watched and passed around way, way more than the total silence in the press would lead people to believe. Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog were some of the only open-minded liberal types I know of that watched it, reviewed it, and gave it a fair shake. Is Walsh's film a right wing polemic? Mostly yes, but the salient issue about it is that it's not at all crazy, and most sensible people — which is most people, beyond political affiliation — are pretty chilled by what's in it.
Lefty/liberal types (and I'd argue the Hillary Clinton/K-Hive/"Colbert'n'Stewart, who'll kill comedy forever" types are not in any way liberal or left at this point, just bitterly partisan for uber-corporate, technocratic, PMC worship) would have been smart to get ahead of this issue by not totally blackballing/isolating/tarring/libeling/slandering the aforementioned Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog's early work on some of the more sensitive parts of the trans issue. When I saw the Walsh film, I kept thinking that someone not blinded by empty partisanship could have produced a similar documentary with that duo at the helm years ago — who, unlike Walsh, don't ultimately maybe think that any gender care should outlawed altogether. Had that alternate reality version of the film been made, we could have maybe prevented this current morass, which is one of a few issues maybe serious and stupid enough to remove all (formerly) liberal parties from power in the west for a generation, with likely wildly reactionary replacements.
We're in a place where this is in no way related to the gay and lesbian marriage issue. Most sensible people, and even many of the evangelicals deeply opposed to that issue on religious grounds, could at least understand, or even empathize, with the argument as a question of pure equality. The trans issue has become so cultish that it makes Scientology seem radically normal, with a bizarre set of beliefs and language regulations that's making seniors and independents repelled by Trump's behavior rethink voting against him again. If you go deep into Mississippi and talk to religious conservative types (and I sometimes do, and they're mostly very nice and smart people!), most of them will even agree that trans folk should be free to live the way they want to live, without harassment or discriminatory laws, but this argument is totally untethered from the issue of simple "equality" at this point.
That famous and sensible liberal types like J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle have somehow become the new face of "transphobia" for honest and often thoughtful work — that dares to question a bizarre and byzantine belief set that changes its rules daily, like the fundamentalist pseudo-religion on heavy psychedelic drugs that it is — shows how wild this has become. I have a lot of friends in my little corner of NYC that bridge multiple generations, and are life-long professed socialists that worked for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, are discussing how terrifying a lot of this is in private, and how their non-profit work has mostly (as described in that recent Ryan Grim piece) become lengthy Zoom meetings about language policing and pronouns.
It's such a shame. I was once a big fan of Jon Stewart (and the now-dead world of late night comedy in general). He can be really funny (still!), but our broken-brained modernity has shown him to be a dim bulb, with no principles or voice of his own. A typical affliction these days, yes, but it's a shame to see Stewart affected by it. We could use someone like the old Stewart to come at this issue with wisdom and empathy and sharply pointed humor, but that Stewart would probably be banned by Twitter.
Perhaps much of what is called "conservative" policy measures is unduly authoritarian and butts in on decision-making territory that usually is best occupied by the patient and his or her physician, but there is now too much evidence that our medical establishment has gone so far down the ideological rabbit hole that a gaping void exists when it comes to The Science. Like our educational institutions, our scientific institutions have become so thoroughly corrupted that the discovery of good quality evidence through open debate between competing theories is not happening . . . Lysenkoism is occurring under an informal regime of "cancel culture," together with the inevitable prioritization of politics above knowledge-creation because the sources of its funding have been over-centralized and placed largely under the control of the state.
If you haven't already, perhaps spend some time listening to experts in their field who will tell you how far the institutions our societies rely on for "the science" have abandoned their founding principles . . . things are bad. Quacks and Zealots are donning white coats and browbeating everyone to "believe in Science," and now too much of the "leadership" in our countries are acting as if they're in a Cargo Cult.
How Gender Activists Dictate "Standards of Care" | with Stella O'Malley
https://youtu.be/0G4DDvc23eg
Saving Child Medicine from Gender Ideology | with Julia Mason
https://youtu.be/3iAd6tSzSYE
Interview with Endocrinologist Will Malone on Gender: A Wider Lens:
https://youtu.be/gOD7Nuwltf0
You are still conflating DSDs (Differences in Sexual Development (examples Klinefelter and androgen insensitivity syndrome)- sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as Intersex) with transgender in your otherwise common sense paragraph about how the left should address this issue.
The people who "don't fit neatly" into male or female are not the people who are "transgender" and medicalizing at new and unheard of rates (also flipped from majority male born to female born recently). See the recent Reuters article about the increases of the last few years.
The issue of DSDs is a separate issue.
The issue of trans identifying people (particularly teens) is mostly people who are 100% one sex, but identify with the "gender identity" of the other sex. They believe altering their body via hormones and/or surgery will help them deal with that congruence. For some it does, and for adults most think they should be allowed to do what they need to do to be happy. But with teens we don't know if that is something they will grow out of, we have started affirming all "questioning" kids which leads to a medicalized path.
Prior to the rise of "affirmation only" of kids who identify as the opposite gender (identity) from their sex, we had a model of "watchful waiting." Under watchful waiting, many teens would desist from the gender incongruance and live in their natal sex. At rates above 80%. I suspect the Arkansas AG was referencing that (not some fabled 98% de-transition rate that you correcty point out is nonsense). When given time and actually going through the puberty of their natal sex many kids will desist. This allows them to live in their healthy body. Currently we can't tell the difference.
See the growing number of actual detransitioners to see that this is true.
We are rushing kids onto this path.
Dems have to take the feet off the gas on this.
Not to mention the plainly insane idea that a male *is* a woman based on Self-ID (simply identifying himself as such). This is the basis for the argument that sports and prisons should be segregated by "gender identity" rather than sex. This is already in place at the highschool sports level all over the country and making its way into higher level sports (obviously the Lia Thomas case, but also see many instances of males winning in women's categories in biking and a male just won a women's surfing competition in Australia, one year after winning the men's). It ridiculous. It completely decimates all good will that most people feel about allowing people to be who they want to be.
Don't make me lie and say a man *is* a woman.
Interestingly - the military did just state trans women, who are born male (redundant, but I guess they had to be clear) must register for the draft and trans men, who are born female, do not.
Meanwhile the same administration supports the aforementioned allowing natal born males into women's sports and prisons based on "gender identity."
Dem's are losing some of us on this. I'm still voting dem, but I can't get myself to give money and knock doors like I used to.
Jeff, you ignored the largest right-wing objection in this, which is the relationship between kids, the parents, and the state.
You might consider some of these teachers simply well-meaning woke people who are trying to help kids find their way. Certainly the left does, and considers counseling kids on their personal transgender questions to be a free speech issue.
The problem is that the other side sees it as a state versus the individual issue, which is made even more stark when legislation permits all of this to be done behind the parents' back. The left's arrogant assumption that their "experts" - i.e. an army of 30 something purple haired single childless women from Vassar - know more about someone's kids than the people that actually raise them rankles people more than the left appreciates. The left truly does not get this.
Maybe this will make more sense with a story.
Little Johnny is a boy who doesn't play sports well. The other boys tend to pick him last for a game of kickball and he feels ignored and depressed. He spends some time playing with the girls, fits in, and then thinks "maybe I should have been a girl." He voices this opinion to the teacher, who encourages it.
Suddenly, little Johnny is a rockstar. Virtue-signaling moms and teachers fall all over themselves to validate little Johnny's new persona. Johnny comes home and tells his parents at dinner that he heard about puberty blockers and wants to take them. Johnny's parents call the principal demanding to know what the fuck are they telling their kid, and the principal tells them that according to state law, this is none of their business.
The double standard is also telling. A 12 year old cannot drink, smoke, get a job, get a tattoo, vote, drive a car, etc because pre-teens don't have that judgement yet. But, according to the left, he can cut off his tallywacker.
"There’s sex, and then there’s gender. Sex involves biological attributes — chromosomes, hormone levels, that kind of stuff. There are anomalies in sex such as Klinefelter syndrome (chromosomes are XXY) and androgen insensitivity syndrome (the body makes testosterone but doesn’t respond to it) that make sex not completely binary. Therefore, sex is basically meaningless and can be ignored. Gender is all that matters. Gender refers to socially-constructed gender roles — playing with dolls if you’re a girl, playing with trucks if you’re a boy, that type of thing. A person chooses their gender identity, so when a person identifies with a gender, they ARE that gender, end of story.
I feel that that’s a fair summation of left-wing canon on this issue."
Your feelings, while understandable, are false...or at least not quite accurate. The position you laid out amounts to the genderists' own Intelligent Design argument -- a bunch of watered-down PR-tested pablum meant to sow just enough doubt into the average layperson's mind that they do not see the insipid and broken theology underlying the activists' zeal. It may be the momentary *consensus* among the professional and managerial class who mean well and are terrified of losing their jobs because they said the wrong thing within earshot of a blue-haired weirdo, but it is not the left-wing canon. The left-wing canon, instead, amounts to this:
1. Everyone is born with a gender identity which is something between a soul and a mental faculty, and which is the most central thing about their identity as a human being. Man, woman, male, female, non-binary, and a whole host of other sex-and-gender labels exclusively refer to a person's gender identity, not to the sex of their physical body.
2. This gender identity may correlate to a biological sex, or it may not. When it does, it may correlate to the sex of one's physical body, or to the opposite sex. When it does not, it may be the null gender (commonly known as "agender"), one of an infinite set of "non-binary" genders (which may exist between or orthogonal to the poles of male and female), or a multi-gender which asserts different aspects at different times. Some gender identities have so little to do with a human body that it is difficult to understand how the two concepts could have ever been related, but even in these cases, it remains a vital part of a person's overall identity.
3. A person's gender identity is fixed from conception, and only belatedly discovered. Once discovered, refusal to acknowledge this gender identity causes the individual extreme distress, the only proper treatment for which is to have everyone the person ever meets affirm their gender identity at all times and in all places (e.g., pronouns are not "preferred", they are correct) and to "pause" a prepubescent child's puberty until a doctor can schedule them for a "gender-affirming" surgery.
4. The way someone expresses their gender (i.e., their gender expression) -- in particular their manner of dress, the cadence and depth of their voice, their hobbies and interests, their propensity for wearing makeup or other ornaments, etc. -- is only loosely correlated with their underlying gender identity. Therefore it is impossible to know in advance whether anyone is a man, woman, male, female, both, or neither.
5. Sexual arousal (i.e., what we have only briefly started calling a person's "sexuality") is almost exclusively governed by a combination of gender expression and gender identity, not by a prospective partner's biological sex. In particular, a person's genitalia should have no bearing upon their viability as a sexual partner to another, as long as both parties have compatible sexualities under the umbrella of gender identity -- so two gay men should not have a problem having sex, even if one (or both) of these men has a vagina (mutatis mutandis gay women/penis).
6. Failure to continuously affirm and evince adherence to all of the above is a sign either of gender heresy or gender blasphemy, which are brought under the common label of "transphobia".
There are doubtless other points I have missed, but this is the bare minimum one must acknowledge in order to avoid the stink of transphobia. This is the ideology lurking beneath your later suggestion of "hey sometimes people are born with weird stuff, and sometimes when a girl is a tomboy it REALLY DOES mean she's actually maybe a boy inside, but there should be some kind of line between shuffling every tomboy into a gender clinic and not having gender clinics at all".
You also err in that transgender people (at least in the West) lack protections; in America and Canada and across the entire European Union, transgender people have protections for employment and housing and basic human dignity. What "protection" they do not yet have is the universal right to force everyone to publicly and privately affirm the dogma I laid out, though in some places they have come mightily close to achieving this.
It is a religious dogma, no less potent and no less toxic to the thinking mind than the Abrahamist faiths to which most of us are accustomed. The muddling contradictions and absurdities that obtain from the affirmation of this faith are not its death knell; they are an inevitable consequence of its nature, which is based in the gathering of social power through the enforcement and propagation of a shared belief. The fact that this belief runs counter to reality does not weaken the belief -- it makes expressions of the belief all the more impactful.
Creo, qui absurdum est.
Jeff, you are wrong about the Arkansas bill: it is not terrible, it is absolutely essential, and needs to be copied nationwide.
You say "It takes what should be a personal decision between a young person and their parents — advised by medical professionals — and hands the decision-making power to the state. It’s fucked up; nobody should have the state butting into their medical decisions."
First of all, as a general principle, the state butts into medical decisions ALL THE TIME, for the excellent reason of preventing bad and dangerous medicine. For example, your doctor can only prescribe FDA approved medication. And this is almost always a good thing!
In the case of "gender affirmation", the medical community has (very sadly and tragically) gone totally off the rails. "Gender affirmation" is NOT evidence based, as unbiased reviews in other countries have clearly shown.
Matt Osborne at The Distance, substack of LGB United, put it well:
>Hundreds of families were told that their children would kill themselves without “gender affirmation.” This is a lie. It has always been a lie.
>There is no science to back it up and the best long-term study [link in original] shows a manifold INCREASE in suicide risk among the POST-transition population.
>Jazz Jennings has a far greater risk of suicide today than if his body had been left alone.
https://thedistance.substack.com/p/vanderbilt-hospital-cites-parental
And here is a good summary of the current situation by Colin Wright:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/how-to-make-a-trans-kid
Here's a citation of where the 98% number comes from or at least a place it could come from
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jocn.16164#:~:text=A%20systematic%20review%20highlights%20that,themselves%20to%20their%20natal%20sex
" systematic review highlights that 61–98% of children and young people who present with gender dysphoria, without medical intervention, desist (Ristoria and Steensma, 2016). That is, naturally stop opposite sex identification and reconcile themselves to their natal sex. "
As an atheist I don't see the conservative position on this issue as having anything to do with religion. Occasionally the state gets involved in decisions between a minor and their parents, for example growing up in California I couldn't get a tattoo at 16 even with parental permission. I generally oppose that, but there does seem to be a trend at the moment where general teen angst and body image issues are being pushed as gender dysphoria. And since there seems to be issues with the use of puberty blockers in regards to the effects on future fertility and sexual health it does seem to be a net positive to ban them for minors
The cons are not wrong about the need for heavy safeguards when it comes to gender dysphoria and kids. All the shit coming out about Mermaids in the UK is horrifying. Including an employee in a child protective services org donning rubber and masturbating on camera in the bathroom at work.
Unfortunately you're granting far too much good faith here. Most of the driving force for these changes is to throw up a bunch of sand so that the subset of trans-identified people who are adult males motivated by paraphilic fixation have social cover. I recommend reading the very good & short book by Michael Bailey, "The Man Who Would Be Queen", available here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281747420_The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen
or the longer and more recent book "Trans" by Helen Joyce, both of which will probably put some jigsaw puzzle pieces in place.
I am quite sympathetic to that group, at least in theory, because in most cases they seem to have had little choice in developing this paraphilia. Unfortunately, most people are not so sympathetic to the idea in the first place, still less to the thought that their acceptance and cooperation with someone's cross-sex presentation in public is actually to further that person's paraphilic gratification. That is why so much chaff has been put up around it, and "trans kids" are ideal for promoting the idea that cross-sex gender identities can be innate, immutable, and essential, which is great cover. And I am not sympathetic to that angle, at all.
For some honest and interesting first-person insights into what I'm talking about here, read some of the threads on this account: https://twitter.com/RecoveringAGP
On the topic of kids, the desistance rate is extremely high and nobody has any way to predict which kids will desist and which will persist. The protocol of social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgeries leads almost inevitably to sterility, very high risk of anorgasmia and sexual dysfunction, not to mention the bone and brain development risks of puberty blockers, and the general-health risks of cross-sex hormones. So given that most kids with early-onset gender dysphoria desist and grow up to be comfortable with their bodies (most of them will be gay), subjecting any of them to an unproven treatment with very serious side effects is unethical. And it is in the interest of the state to prevent children from being subjected to unethical or unproven medical procedures, those that carry serious risks and side effects and have not been proven effective by high-quality evidence.
For the late-onset (usually teen) gender dysphoria crowd, predominantly female, they are a new group with virtually no evidence at all as to what interventions will be effective. I find the theory of James Cantor that they are likely suffering from BPD quite plausible. Treating one psychological disorder with the physical interventions claimed to be appropriate for a completely different disorder is, pardon my language, insane. It is like going to the doctor to complain about psychosomatic fatigue caused by depression and having them prescribe you methamphetamines. Even if it was a good treatment for fatigue (probably not), it sure isn't a good treatment for depression. (Though it might make you feel pretty good for a while, something that is also true of testosterone for teenage girls.)
It is a difficult thing to appreciate that this entire construct might be so much horseshit. There might not be any such thing as gender identity. Many of the prominent individuals arguing passionately for their rights might actually be motivated by a private sexual fantasy, not "a woman's brain in a man's body". The entire phenomenon of trans kids might - outside of the very small number of young children who were known to experience serious gender dysphoria - have no more objective reality than the Indigo Children or the satanic abuse panic.
It sucks to think about. For me it especially sucks since my liberal tribe is all-in on this, and in major media only right-wing nutjobs will bring it up. Unfortunately, "I believe the exact opposite of what Tucker Carlson says about everything" is not a fully reliable guide to everything in the world.
So much that is frustrating comes down to language policing. There are now two distinct definitions of "woman" in the lexicon - an older, more common definition referring to sex, chromosomes, reproductive organs, etc., and a more recent definition referring to gender identity. Both definitions have their uses, and it nearly always obvious which word people mean from context (nobody sane is confused about which definition is meant by the phrase "pregnant women"). The problem is that instead of celebrating the widespread adoption of the latter, more inclusive definition where applicable, the modern left would like to ban the former definition from all usage, despite it's irreplaceable usefulness in describing the basics of human reproduction and sex drive.
Here is what I think has happened with the gender-affirming care for kids debate. I think there are a number of trans activists who knew they were trans at a young age and were unable to access any kind of care when they were young, and thus had very painful childhood and adolescence experiences. They now see these new treatments, and probably correctly surmise that had they been able to access puberty blockers and the like they would have had a much easier childhood and adolescence. Given that lived experience, of course you are going to push hard to maximize access to these treatments - they know it would have helped them and sincerely believe that denying these treatments to anyone is akin to sentencing kids to the same pain they experienced.
But the problem with lived experience is it is YOUR experience. By definition it cannot tell you if your experience was typical or not. As a corollary, lived experience often sets you up for survivor bias: Imagine LeBron James saying “I don’t know why people stress about picking a career, I just played basketball and it worked out for me!”
Today’s trans activists are, almost by definition, those whose gender dysphoria didn’t desist. But that doesn’t mean that experience will be true for every kid, and indeed there is research that greater than 50% of kids who experience dysphoria do eventually desist, and allowing those kids access to permanent changes to their bodies will likely lead to some terrible regret.
It’s just a difficult, painful issue. It’s horrible that states like Texas and Arkansas are trying to aggressively insert themselves in profoundly unhelpful ways. But it also isn’t helpful to call anyone who thinks we might want to be careful with medical interventions anti-trans bigots.
Necessary and sufficient conditions work great for human-created constructs. Are there necessary and sufficient conditions for a card game to be considered "Go Fish"? Yes!
Naturally occurring phenomena don't lend themselves to necessary and sufficient conditions. Is Pluto a planet? What set of qualities should group animals into a phylum? We like to categorize things, but the best we can do is identify a constellation of characteristics that pick out a planet, a phylum of animals, or a woman or man. As you say, we can generally pick out women and men despite exceptions like people with androgen insensitivity. That's why it chaps my ass that conservative play "gotcha" by demanding necessary and sufficient conditions to define a woman, and it equally bugs me that the left insists that there is no constellation of characteristics that generally allow us to identify a woman or a man.
It's adolescent to insist that everything has to be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. Grownups realize that the world is complicated.
If a trans woman has had genital surgery and has been on HRT for a decade or so and living as a woman full-time, then it's pretty much impossible to tell that she is trans and not cis without a DNA test (or asking her, or checking her medical records). It would seem ridiculous to me to refer to her with masculine pronouns or force her to use the men's toilets. That's what I mean when I say "trans women are women".
There are a bunch of things that we can argue about without trying to claim that trans women aren't women: transition is a process, but we have to have binary divisions in a number of cases - if there are men's and women's toilets or changing rooms, then people have to go to one or the other, and they have to change at some point. The correct point at which they should change is something we can debate - having some widely agreed guidelines would really help a lot of people (including many trans people themselves, who may well not want to change on day one, but would like a hint of when they should).
I think a lot of people are reasonably annoyed at the idea that a man can say "I'm a woman now" and walk into the women's facilities everywhere. But (apart from a small number of assholes), that's not what generally happens. At some point they switch. Lots of them go a few months when they just don't go out for long enough that they need to go, so that when they do start going into the women's, lots of people have started treating them as female.
Exactly how sports should work is something else to be legitimately debated - I tend to the view that a lot of sport exists mostly for the fun of playing and for teamwork, rather than being super-competitive (people are still trying to win, of course) and the sort of relatively minor advantages that trans women have over cis women aren't much different to "doing an extra hour a week in the gym" or something - and since most of the people I'm thinking of aren't necessarily doing a full hour in the gym every week, that's just not enough to care about.
At the élite end, then we do need a better scientific study for those trans women who went through male puberty (those that didn't, ie had access to puberty blockers early on, should clearly be allowed to compete; they can't have had any advantages). The questions should be about things like "how much does performance drop, and how quickly?", "can a trans woman who was in heavy training before transition retain muscle mass by training right through?", "how much do things (like bone density) that don't change really matter?" Perhaps the answer will be to require a trans woman to have had low T levels for a certain period, perhaps she will be required to decondition after dropping to low T so when she reconditions, she will have to build muscle mass slowly (like a cis woman) rather than being able to retain what she had from when she had male hormone levels, perhaps some sports will have to have weight classes for safety reasons (combat sports already do, of course; perhaps some non-combat heavy-contact sports like rugby or American football should anyway), perhaps there are a few sports where women who went through a T-based puberty would have to be excluded (I originally wrote "trans" women and "male" puberty in this, but there are cis women who went through a T-based puberty because they mistakenly thought they were trans men and they will have exactly the same advantages as trans women who transitioned after T-based puberty).
And then there are intermediate levels - especially youth sports where trans athletes have had far fewer opportunities to transition, and where "take three years out" amounts to "never compete at all". While élite sports pose the hardest technical/scientific questions, I think these are the hardest ethical questions: If a trans girl comes out at 17, can she switch from the boy's team to the girl's immediately at high school? If not, when can she, how much physical transition does she have to undergo? How much risk are we prepared to put her on if she's still playing on the boy's team? Remember that her physical abilities will be changing as her body changes. Are we prepared to say to her that she has to choose between her sport and her gender? If she will be allowed to compete in the women's NCAA in two years' time when she's transitioned enough, how is she supposed to compete for a scholarship? Obviously, she has advantages if she only started on hormones a few months ago - but she has disadvantages compared to the boys too. If it's an individual sport competed against the environment (golf, running, swimming, etc), then we can just let her record her times/distances and let the college recruiters sort it out to some degree. But we can't do that if she plays a team sport like basketball. Or even an individual sport like tennis. Which team is she on? Who does she compete against? When does she change?
One of the things I really hate about this is that there are lots of people whose fundamental position is: "everyone is born either male or female, this can never change, in any situation where we separate the sexes, they should always go with how they were born" - which is the basic conservative/anti-trans position - who are determined not to just say that. There are also a noisy but quite small chunk of people who think "the moment you say you are a woman, you are a woman in all respects, and anyone objecting to this in any way is an unredeemable bigot". The combination of these makes it nearly impossible for anyone who holds that trans women *can* be treated entirely as women, but that different aspects of that should be granted at different times to get into the details that can make this work.
Changing your name: whenever you like. Changing your pronouns: ask me and I will. Changing which toilet you use: when you'll create less trouble in the women's than the men's, but you go where you want to; that's a recommendation, not a rule. Changing which team you compete on in sport: when it's fair - and that one *is* a rule. The analogy I like to use is adulthood. There isn't some magical difference between 17 years and 364 days and 18 years and zero days - and a bunch of adult rights aren't granted at 18 anyway (e.g. driving can be as young as 14, drinking is 21, etc). Similarly, someone transitioning will get different things at different stages.
Also, too much of this debate, including much of my posting above, ignores trans men.
And non-binary people are, well, non-binary. They were mostly born male or female (some were born intersex). But they transition to being non-binary. Sometimes that's physical, sometimes it isn't. It's surprising how much someone can change your perceptions of them without any physical changes. I don't have all the answers: non-binary sport? I mean, if you're not physically transitioning, why not compete with your birth sex? Toilets: go where suits you or where you feel most comfortable. Maybe having some unsegregated toilets would be a good idea?
I know I don't have all the answers. But I'd like to have some sort of public space to explore the questions without getting attacked by people who are convinced that every single trans person is a terrifying sexual predator.
Another solid base hit - so, thanks! But you may have missed a spot. It might be comically productive to speculate on the potential outcome if more people actually accepted the enlightened new thinking about childhood sexuality and decided to ride that little pony into the future. Since it’s reasonable to assume heteronormative preferences would actually outnumber the brave choices of trailblazing transactivists, we could celebrate the advent of penile enlargement for Pop Warner football players and breast enhancement for Brownies. Sounds great doesn’t it?
Of course it would certainly provide excellent investment opportunities for socially conscious shareholders focussed on healthcare, something that we can expect to extend the arc of history further toward it’s inevitable happy ending.