This relates to an issue I have with trans rights activists. They seem to set the bar waaaay too high. They don't just want you to accept them as people, and grant them all the rights anyone else has, they want you to accept their epistemology.
My recollection with the fight for gay rights, and gay marriage in particular, was that they were looking for tolerance and equal rights. It was ok if you believed that marriage was between a man and a women, so long as you didn't stand in the way of the US recognizing gay marriages or same sex couples getting married. You didn't have to be personally OK with same sex relationships, so long as you treated everyone equally. This was important because you have a lot of people, e.g. Catholics, where these things are literally against their religion, but who are OK living in a pluralistic world.
The same is pretty clearly not true for trans activists. You can support every aspect of the Trans Right movement, anti-discrimination laws, pronouns, military, bathrooms, sports teams, etc.. You can even personally believe that it is fine to be trans. But if you don't buy into the epistemology, i.e. that TWAW, you are called a bigot and told that you want trans people dead.
This is particularly rough because you don't chose your beliefs. You can be more or less open to arguments on an issue, but, if you haven't been convinced of something, you haven't been convinced. To make your having been convinced (or at least being willing to lie about your beliefs), rather than your willingness to live and let live, as a ticket to polite society, seems out of step with what it means to live in a liberal democracy.
We live in a pluralistic society. People's beliefs are going to differ. I have friends who are Christians, who I respect as people despite not agreeing with them that they have an immortal soul. I have friends who are Scientologists who I respect as people despite not agreeing that they are full of thetan. I don't need to agree with someone on their gender to respect them and believe they should be able to live their best life.
I think this is why the weird debate on the left about these issues is so unsettling because their seems to be a persistent effort to just hand wave away the extent to which their is an ideology at play that many people simply do not understand. So sure, trans women are women, but is a trans woman a woman in exactly the same way as I am? I don't quite know how to make sense of that because I don't have any gender identity distinct from my biology -- I know I am a woman because I have a uterus and female endocrine system etc. but I am a misanthrope and I don't feel I have that much in common with other women or other men. So when a comedian points out that most of us don't really believe that trans women are women in exactly the same way as other women the left media in a well intentioned effort to support trans people who clearly have a pretty large cross to bear acts as if that is some fringe view. Their was an NYMag story about Netflix and the controversy recently that described Chappelle as "obsessed" with trans people because it seems necessary to treat people who are probing the many challenging implications of divorcing sex and gender identity as freaky when it's actually pretty normal to want to understand why exactly we would jump on board such a radical cultural change without understanding the consequences. And that kind of gaslighting really does make it more likely that people don't trust the media because they are telling them things that are plainly untrue or pretty misleading (e.g. trans women have no advantage in sports).
This mirrors my feeling on this. I think biological sex can predict things about you (including bother body parts and personality), but I don't understand how falling outside the norm of those predictions means that you are not your biological sex. If I role a D20 10 times, it is possible that all the rolls come in under 6, but that wouldn't mean that I was rolling a D6.
I also think there’s been a shift in how we talk about inclusivity, where anything that applies to a vast majority but not to a tiny minority is considered to be non-inclusive and therefore harmful. On Twitter Jesse Singal shared an email from a rich Boston suburban school district that said (paraphrasing), we know a lot of kids love wearing their Halloween costumes to school, but there are also kids who don’t like it or can’t afford costumes, so since we’re an inclusive school we’re not letting kids wear costumes to school this year. I don’t know what the school’s angle was—maybe they just didn’t want costumes and were using “inclusivity” as a cover story—but the point is that that kind of reasoning gets treated as normal instead of bizarre. It seems clear to me that we’ll never live in a world where we as a society don’t describe women giving birth as the default or say “is it a boy or a girl?” or expect people to assume that Margaret with long hair is a woman, and it also seems clear to me that if I’m right that’s nevertheless compatible with political equality for trans and NB people, so we should fight on the ground we can actually win.
Yes, excellent point in your first sentence. Also relates to the insistence in some channels on using "Latinx" because it's purportedly "inclusive," even though it's overwhelmingly not used (if not affirmatively rejected) by the Hispanic/Latino community itself.
Yes, exactly. And to be clear, if someone prefers to be called “they” or “Latinx” I think it’s just common courtesy to accommodate them. It’s treating those as the default, where some people argue that we should not assign gender to newborn babies or where an academic job title is now certain to be “professor of Latinx studies,” that not only seems overconfident about where this is going, but also seems to violate other progressive commitments (for instance that we should call marginalized populations by the terms they prefer).
I guess you could charitably say that it doesn't violate any commitments because for these particular progressives, their commitment is not really "call marginalized populations by the terms they prefer" but "in any dispute between two different populations the *more* marginalized population's views must win."
It's a horrible rule of thumb that produces unending moving goalposts as folks tie themselves into knots trying to establish who's more marginalized.
Is it the gay Asian kid kicked out of home at 17 who gets into an Ivy League school but can barely survive to graduate, or the Hispanic immigrant who builds a successful business and raises a family before she gets detained by ICE and booted across the border even though she's a legal resident?
Is it the poor white family who can't afford to control their child's diabetes, or the middle-class black one who've been pulled over and treated horribly by police?
Is it the working-class black family who get priced out of their apartment in a newly desirable neighborhood downtown, or the white lesbian couple who outbid them so they can live in a more accepting community?
"Solidarity," a universal understanding of our shared humanity and a mutual obligation to reach best-faith consensus and make policy and decisions on that basis, is the only answer to these problems.
Not some mush-minded idiocy about who's worse off.
Sure, but how can an entire population have views? People's views are ultimately individual and not a reliable guide to the opinions of their entire demographic. Anyway, this principle gets abandoned in the case of average differences in viewpoints between, e.g., college-educated Black Americans and working-class Black Americans about the police, or Latino US citizens with grad degrees and recent Mexican immigrant farmworkers with limited English about how to refer to people of Latin American descent. Who's "more marginalized" is pretty clear there, and in which direction their opinions differ is also pretty clear.
I forgot where I heard this, but someone said that when you hear the word "inclusive" that actually means "censored". The reasoning was that, to feel included you must not feel offended, so an inclusive group avoids words and actions that might be offensive. I think the kind of "inclusivity" you cite here fits that description.
I feel like the big difference between the gay rights movement and the trans rights movement is that the gay rights movement had a big legislative goal (gay marriage) while the trans rights movement kind of doesn't, or if it does it's on the defensive ends of them (shooting down bathroom bills, etc.). So a lot of trans activism has less to do with electoral politics in general than with sort of aggressive etiquette policing.
I think viewing the gay rights movement as being about a legislative goal focuses too much on recent goals of the movement, which to some extent were built upon more fundamental work: reframing homosexuality as a civil rights movement (it's bad to discriminate against people due to their sexual preference, it's bad that people commit violence against gay people for being gay), dismantling a previously strongly held view (sexual preference is a choice and that choice can be pathological or immoral).
We've come so far in that direction that the "before times" are almost unimaginable now. In the 80s I read a serious op-ed in Newsweek (cuz that was a thing) from someone who wanted the gay community to go _pick a different term_ so that he could have the word "gay" back without connotations of homosexuality.
I bring up this (very dumb) example because the big framing change was going from "the problem is with the gay community, they need to change their behavior" to "the problem is with society, they need to stop discriminating." I view that shift as a huge civil rights victory.
MY has commented about this in the past in his column about the Overton window (which may be paywalled) - the idea is that if your views aren't widely accepted, the task at hand is persuasion.
I depends on how far back you go. When I was a kid, gay rights was really focused on the AIDS epidemic because the public mostly wrote it off as a gay pandemic and/or god punishing them for their sins; it was a problem for *those people*. My recollection was that the gay marriage stuff didn't really become a touchstone until the mid-to-late 90's because by then activism around AIDS had brought so many people out of the closet that it became untenable to blame *those people* since they were actually your friends and family. So the opposition pivoted to "protecting families" and came up with a whole line of bullshit about how marriage is only for procreation. And the mainstream backlash to that stupidity is what focused the public discourse on marriage.
Seems to me that trans rights activism is following that pattern, by expressive anger at feeling othered and responding to assaults on their rights one-by-one as the opposition tees up bathroom bills and laws about birth certificates. To wit, it was not that long ago that I only got two boxes to tick for "sex" on forms. Eventually the opposition hit something catastrophically stupid that galvanizes the mainstream in favor of some pro-trans policy and a new status quo will emerge. (I do not mean to diminish the hard work of activists that actually drives all of these changes!)
I think this will be different. Two gay people getting married doesn't really effect most people (except bakers and florists). But having a man in your daughters bathroom/locker room. Or competing against her in sports is something that effects a lot of people.
What about someone's trans daughter being forced to use the boy's room? Why is the only victim worth protecting the hypothetical innocent cis daughter?
If there is a man, and not a trans woman, in the women's room, what is the actual issue? It's weird and socially a faux pas, but what do you want to do about it? Should a man go to jail because he was about to shit himself and the women's room was open? Is it a problem for a father to be changing his kid's diaper in the women's room if the men's room doesn't have a changing table? It's a women's room, it's not even like there's a risk of anyone being exposed to the sight of his penis.
Now, if you're actually worried about men committing sexual assault or sexual harassment in a woman's bathroom, that's *already* a crime, and laws denying access to bathrooms to trans women isn't going to stop a cis man who wants to attack women in a bathroom because he already doesn't care what the law says.
No, I think TERFs are bigoted for digging up the corpse of the anti-gay "think about our poor boys in the restroom with the perverts" canard.
It turns out that most people are pretty normal and that people born with XY chromosomes aren't in fact sexbeasts, and are in fact capable of controlling their animal lusts within 20 feet of a toilet.
I agree that there are corner cases where policy solutions are not so clear cut.
Chappelle had a bit where he said if a women walked up to the urinal next to him, hiked up her skirt and pulled out her penis, she would seem out of place. But that if a man with a vagina dropped trow and backed up to a urinal to take a piss, he wouldn't think twice about it. That make sense to me, but as with many things, the situation with kids (e.g., youth sports) is different.
So we're going to have to work through the specific case of sports. But other than that (not insignificant) issue, it is easy to see trans rights playing out similarly to gay rights because the only reason to oppose explicit equal rights is to validate a certain segment of non-college-educated working-class whites that Republicans need to win/steal elections. Realistically, granting those rights impacts almost no one outside the trans community, just like same-sex marriage.
And yet twenty years ago, people vociferously argued that allowing same-sex couples to marry would undermine the institution for everyone. It wasn’t understood as the couple’s own business.
Yes, this is one of the things that's kind of awkward for the narrative of the supposedly impending trans genocide -- even the vast majority of "Red" states already allow people to redefine their sex on their birth certificates (only KS and TN don't according to the list here: https://www.lambdalegal.org/know-your-rights/article/trans-changing-birth-certificate-sex-designations ) and be legally recognized as their preferred sex.
Do you think those goals are “strident”? They seem legitimate to me, and I’d way rather be talking about that than if I need to identify as a “cervix-endowed person.”
I think everyone should be treated with respect. But that doesn't mean I have to believe your delusion. A man pretending to be a women doesn't make them a women anymore than them pretending to be a cat makes them a cat.
The way you feel doesn't change objective reality.
And my tax dollars certainly shouldn't have to cover it.
The trans philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell has likened trans women being called women to adoptive parents being called parents. Of course, no amount of legal status or emotional relationship to a child will ever erase the lack of genetic relatedness between an adoptive parent and their child – "the way you feel doesn't change objective reality" – and the situation of an adoptive family is always going to be different from a biological family in terms of establishing a relationship (or none) with biological parents, and in terms of dealing with the medical system as you may have more trouble getting information on family medical history. Plus there's the risk of not being seen in public as your child's parent if you don't look like them. These are facts inherent to adoptive parenting, even in a maximally tolerant society. But if you died on the hill of refusing to call adoptive parents "parents", you can see why people would get really upset. And I don't think most people would regard it as a brave stand for truth.
That analogy doesn't work, and it's because "parenting" is a concrete action that a person takes but "womaning" is not. If a natal male person transitions, how can we describe that person as "womaning" in any way other than just performing stereotypes? [thanks to Helen Joyce for that observation, although she said it better than I did]
What about burn victims who need cosmetic surgery, or women who want reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy? You’re still a woman, breasts or not, but a lot of women find the lack of them distressing.
If we believe in fundamental characteristics, then we agree that starts in the brain, no? There’s some neurological wiring that says, “I am a woman” or “I am a man.” Just as by and large, we have wiring saying “I will want to have sex with people of the opposite sex when I hit puberty.”
Just as we now accept that sometimes that wiring doesn’t always go as planned when it comes to sexual attraction, surely we can accept that some people have divergent wiring when it comes to sexual identification.
We don’t tell a gay man that he is objectively incorrect that he is attracted to men. Similarly, we should accept that some people are neurologically wired to feel like their gender that doesn’t match their sex. It’s not a delusion. They recognize their bodies don’t match their minds.
You frame these questions interestingly because I would agree that the wiring in the brain can lead to non standard responses. We've changed how we answer the question of which answers are viewed as acceptable and which are viewed as not.
More to the point, the discussion currently is whether people can redefine themselves as how they feel from the neurological wiring and whether they can go so far as to rewrite their bodies to match that wiring. Would it also be acceptable to redo the neurological wiring if we understood how?
As a cis woman, I am fine with sharing a locker room with someone who has had at least some gender reassignment surgery / hormones, partly because that demonstrates a serious commitment to identifying as a woman.
As for someone who has a man’s body (penis, and probably somewhat taller & stronger than the average woman), no, I do not want to share a locker room. That feels unsafe to me. And I’m not saying a trans woman would be more violent or anything. I just think there’s a fair number of skeevy, cis, straight men who would be happy to lie and hang out with a bunch of naked ladies, and I don’t think it’s fair to ask me to potentially risk getting assaulted.
Bathrooms, I don’t care, because you’re not getting naked, nor are you going to see anyone else naked.
My understanding is that some people identify as trans, but not everyone experiences body dysmorphia. If you want hormones or surgery, yes, I think you should have a medical diagnosis. You can’t even get anti-depressants without a doctor’s consult.
I do not support teens taking hormones, even ones just delaying puberty unless they’ve been 100% proven safe.
Right on. I find this especially difficult because it's really hard for me to wrap my head around and accept the epistemology.
For example, I don't find it very hard to imagine being gay. It's actually seems pretty natural --- literally; it happens fairly frequently in nature. Perhaps for that reason, I don't find the idea hard to wrap my head around.
But feeling so fundamentally incompatible with the body you're born into? As much as I try, I just can't fathom it, and I speak as someone with health conditions that I'd much rather not have. And the treatments for this incompatability are decidedly unnatural. Even thinking about common surgical procedures can make me feel ill --- nevermind more invasive procedures. (I actually fainted once when someone described a pretty invasive back surgery in gory detail --- altho there were probably also other factors at play in my fainting.)
I realize that, fundamentally, this is my problem, and people should be able to live their lives as they please. But I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with all of this, and I doubt that will change. I feel guilty for feeling this way, but them's the breaks, and trying to force a philosophy on me can only backfire. Maybe someday I'll grow it, but I doubt it.
So to be completely fair, we can’t know if those animals are gay, or trans. Animals that engage in homosexual behavior often demonstrate other behaviors associated with the other sex of their species. And we can’t ask them, lol.
I've always been devoutly Catholic, and in college I had a friend who was atheist, and would just tell me he had no respect for belief in God, church, etc....we would go have a beer and talk about rock bands.
Ah, I have identified a commentator who just needs to visibly Do The Work so that they can be seen to have come to the correct conclusions. If you don't have the correct conclusions yet, you need to Do The Work more.
The "Trans women are women" thing hits me as similarly blunt as "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" chant in the 2000s. People did, in fact, get used to it, and so the chant went away.
There's a difference between the gay demand to be accepted and (to switch a bit) using the case of trans men becoming pregnant to say that one must stop using the general term "pregnant women" and must say "pregnant people." It's using a very tiny edge case to define the terms that all must now conform to. While one must stand up for the rights of trans men, including to abortion, birth control, etc., I don't see the case for that situation defining our general language. If I were a woman who had fought decades for women's rights, I'd be pretty pissed. What's next -- domestic violence and rape are "people problems"?
To use another linguistic example: By the rules of Hebrew, if you're talking to an audience of a thousand women, you use the feminine form of Hebrew verbs. But if one man happens to enter the audience, by the rules of grammar, you're supposed to switch to the masculine verb forms.
Obviously there are differences here -- men, unlike trans people, have long been the dominant gender and language reflects that -- but the wild imbalance still grates.
Wait but domestic violence and rape *are* people problems that happen to people no matter their gender or birth sex and it would be really helpful if we remembered that a little more often. I'm not sure how skewed the impact is, but I'm confident it's much less skewed than pregnancy issues.
Absolutely true that men can be victims of rape (especially in prison) as well as victims of domestic violence. But it's so disproportionately a problem for women that I think we lose a lot when we try to cram the entire world into a single word or phrase.
There’s a pretty obvious difference of scale here. Tweaking one’s definition of marriage comes up very infrequently and really is just a tweak (expanding the category “married” to include same-sex couples who have undergone the same ceremony), plus i think most activists didn’t care as much about whether someone was willing to make that tweak as long as the LEGAL right was secured. Eliminating gender from our understanding of how humans and human society works is a much more pervasive change, particularly, as Marc alludes to, since feminism and progressivism have for years viewed the different experiences and treatment of women as being vital matters of attention.
"Trans women are women" is exactly the same type of tweak! It simply expands the category "women" to include some persons not assigned female at birth who sufficiently identify as women.
"Pregnant people" is not eliminating gender from our understanding. It's separating gender and biological sex, albeit in a edge case (that IMO is not a big deal either way).
Besides, gender abolition is a fringe position; its not even widely accepted in progressive circles! A lot of binary trans people ~like~ gender, as long as they can be accepted as the gender they self ID as.
Right but the category "women" is much much bigger and more fundamental to our understanding of the world than the category "marriage." "Married" is contingent; "woman" or "man" is essential for >99% of people.
But a lot of activism in the 2000s was Andrew Sullivan style ‘we’re here, gay marriage is fundamentally conservative, which should be very easy to get used to’
They're both slogans, but I'm not sure that they are the same ask. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it," is demanding a spot in society, but less so a spot in your epistemology.
But it’s genuinely unclear whether “get used to it” made more of a difference than, like, Will and Grace and Ellen and various other mealy-mouthed sellout assimilationist moves.
I wasn’t really being sincere there, but I recall more radical gay and lesbian activists complaining about the safe, de-sexed, sanitized gays on such shows.
True, but I'm comparing blunt "in your face" slogans. There are similar trans assimilationist media equivalents like Transparent, Orange is the New Black, Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, etc.
One of these statements is true. The other is simply not, unless you redefine the word involved to make it effectively meaningless. That's the problem - activists are asking people to mouth a mantra that everyone knows is not true.
Consider that the things which people insist matter most to them do, in fact, matter most to them. Seems pretty straightforward to me that the epistemology - the social confirmation of status - is, for a non-trivial and loud portion of the trans movement, the point, beyond and above any policy intervention or material discrimination.
I'm sure that there are people for whom this matters very much. There are a lot of things that matter very much to people. I don't think that you have to just accept something because if matters very much to someone.
It is also worth noting that this is something on which you have conflicting groups caring very much about it. While I do not agree with Terf/gender critical feminists on most policy ideas, I truly believe that not expanding the definition of "woman" to include transwomen, or shrinking the definition of "women" to exclude men matters very much to them.
I recently heard an interview with two mothers, who believed that their daughters (amab) were confused and were making an error in medically transitioning that they would live to regret. I think it is likely that those mothers were mistaken, but I also believe that it mattered very much to them that their children not make what they saw as a mistake
Personally, I don't think that this matters most to me, but my problem is that I can only believe what I believe. And it upsets me when people call me a bigot and accuse me of basically wanting to commit genocide because I can't switch my beliefs, even if I am otherwise on board for the project.
I mean, accusations of being a bigot and wanting to commit genocide are rhetorical clubs, designed to rally force against enemies. with the particular language subject to change depending on the normative moral standards of the place and time. Those are going to fly wherever there's a social conflict. And yeah, the problem with this loud portion of the trans movement is that their big ask just is incommensurate with the big asks of significant other groups. Worse, even if that weren't the case, getting confirmation of success would necessarily involve some sort of obnoxiously-invasive loyalty-testing and thought-policing. So someone is gonna win, and someone is gonna lose.
Do you honestly think that gay people a few decades back didn't care if you thought they were straight? Do you understand their demand as asking you to believe that they were straight people who wanted you to respect their decision to be married to a member of the opposite sex?
It's just categorization. I don't believe anyone really cares if you think a trans woman is a woman. However, calling her a man to her face isn't much different than calling a gay man a faggot. It's rude and unnecessary. Ranting about it in a forum isn't much better. As far as what is a man and what is a woman, this long post is an excellent(and amusing) read:
I agree that it is just a categorization, but I think it makes more sense to categorize transwomen as men and vice versa. In particular, I tend to think that strict gender roles are bad and that categorizing transwomen as women reinforces that view. I otherwise am perfectly fine with transgendered people (which is actually what rejecting gender roles would require).
I understand that transgendered people find it offensive to say this, and I would not say it to their face, particularly unprompted, in the same way that I don't generally bring up my skepticism of Scientology with my friends who are scientologists. However, when the issue comes up, I do think it is appropriate to discuss it, particularly when it is in the context of someone else being dragged for having the same disagreement. I don't think debates should be allowed to be one sided.
I listened to the slatestarcodex post and I pretty much agree with it, including the idea that there is no harm and quite a lot of benefits to allowing transgendered people present as their prefered gender.
However, I just don't think that self-ID is a good way to draw the line. I think doing so beings too much baggage with it on other gender issues that I had thought we were moving past.
For the record, I also disagree with the way they drew the line on planets. I think "cleared their neighborhood " is too subjective and we should instead say that the planet can't orbit the barycenter of any other planet, which gets Pluto and Charon on the list.
Either the Democrats get their own house in order by shouting down the "professional class propriety" assholes, which gets them enough votes from the culturally-conservative-but-populist folks to really cement a governing coalition and effect some change...
Or they fail, and a lot of mushy middle folks end up voting Republican, which leads in the short-term to the economic consensus shifting even further away from effective and active governance. But that will sow the seeds of its own demise, frankly, because it doesn't and can't address real problems.
The wedge issue is womens’ sports. Suburban dads want their daughters to pursue excellence. Their daughters will never be as fast or as strong as athletic boys, but the training, discipline, struggle and joy of athletic competition are just as sweet for women as men. Watching Lindsay Vonn ski fearlessly was beautiful even though she was 3% slower than the elite men.
Allowing trans athletes to compete as women shits on the struggle of girls and women for physical excellence. It subordinates the needs of the 99% to the 1% and allows the exception to deconstruct the rule. I’m all for toleration, but I would become a lot less tolerant if trans gender athletes destroy paths of female excellence.
I've seen arguments that transgender athletes aren't that big of an issue since their aren't that many transgender athletes in High School or College sports, so why complain.
This argument is short-sighted for several reasons. First, the prevalence of transgenderism (is that the correct word) has significantly increased among children, so the issue will become more prevalent in the future.
The other reason why this argument is short circuited, is because their is an arbitrary cutoff for how many people have to be effected by an issue for it to be relevant.
For instance, I am guessing that the number of men who get pregnant is lower than the number of trans-women who dominate a sport.
The sports issues is only going to become more prevalent and significant in the future.
“First, the prevalence of transgenderism (is that the correct word) has significantly increased among children”
Frankly, as the parent of a young daughter, I don’t give a damn about sports in this context.
I care about the fact that that increase in the prevalence of gender dysphoria shows every sign of being due to mass hysteria/faddishness, nothing more.
I care about the fact that the treatment modes for gender dysphoria are deeply, deeply broken, and that the medical community’s increasing consensus on that matter is criticized for political reasons.
Hopefully, by the time my daughter is older, this will have been worked out in an evidence-based manner, but I have to admit… If I were taking her to be treated for a related condition today, I would not do it in the United States.
This just seems like the fad of young women identifying as bisexual as gay marriage became more accepted. Some of them genuinely were. Some of them were just experimenting with their identity.
Much like how a straight person who claims to be bisexual for the bohemian cool points would balk at having a same-sex sexual encounter in the moment, a cisgender person claiming gender dyphoria would also probably not commit to living as a different gender. Meanwhile, growing acceptance of LGBT people is an overall good thing for the real bi/homosexuals and transgender people.
"This just seems like the fad of young women identifying as bisexual as gay marriage became more accepted. Some of them genuinely were. Some of them were just experimenting with their identity."
The difference is the push for them to start puberty blocking hormones, or surgery.
That's a huge difference than maybe drunk fooling around with someone of the same sex and then deciding it's not for you
Most underage transitioning is just social. You wear different clothes, change your hair, use different gendered rooms, and go by a different name. So in that case, it is equivalent to "drunkenly fooling around". Cis kids would start to feel gender dysphoria in those conditions and decide not to pursue it further.
You're not making irrevocable changes. You can't get surgery until you're 18. I don't even think you can start taking hormones until you're 16, unless you've been extensively cleared by psychological and medical experts and have been living as the opposite gender for several years.
Hormone blockers are already prescribed to cisgender kids for non-transitionary reasons. If a few deluded cis kids manage to convince doctors that they should spend some time on blockers and MAYBE develop health issues later in life, but it saves the lives of many more trans kids who won't go through the wrong puberty and end up depressed adults with irrevocably damaged bodies, that's a trade I think is worth making.
"You're not making irrevocable changes. You can't get surgery until you're 18. I don't even think you can start taking hormones until you're 16,"
Incorrect on both. They are allowing kids to make these life altering decisions that are often irreversible. Puberty blocking hormones can lead to sterility. And can even make it so you can never orgasm later.
These kids don't know what they are doing. And it's medical malpractice that doctors are doing it.
When I was a teen, there was an epidemic of kids cutting themselves that people blamed on 2000s era emo music and the associated aesthetic of self-harm. Some of them had genuine depression, others were doing it to get attention. That left actual permanent scars on people. However, our generation somehow managed to survive and become responsible adults. There's always been a "kids these days" problem with the media they consume.
There's strong evidence that adolescent depression and anxiety has spiked since ~2010, particularly for girls. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that body dysmorphia / physical tics/ and other mental health disorders might be increasing for the same reasons.
There is a very strong case to be made that the rise in gender dysphoria is the result of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment. Research is ongoing.
Ehhh, "very strong" is not how that research should be characterized. It wasn't in 2014 and not much has changed since.
Meanwhile, there are well-documented cases of "mass gender dysphoria outbreaks" among young girls, and parents and professionals who push back against early medical intervention in favor of in-depth psychological evaluation and treatment are being marginalized or even attacked.
“This paper estimates the workplace productivity effects of COVID-19 by studying performance of soccer players after an
infection. We construct a dataset that encompasses all traceable infections in the elite leagues of Germany and Italy. Relying on a staggered difference-in-differences design, we identify negative short- and longer-run performance effects. Relative to their preinfection outcomes, infected players’ performance temporarily drops by more than 6%.Over half a year later, it is still around 5% lower.”
There is also a very strong case that somatic or hysteria causes for issues are more prevalent that people would care to admit.
The same people who say their should be a stigma against mental health issues, are extremely reluctant to talk about somatic or hysteria related contributions to issues.
There is evidence that long covid, Cuba syndrome (the embassy microwave attacks), and now Tourette's are all caused by some form of hysteria.
Doctors on the QT talk about it, but it is a forbidden subject in popular discourse.
We should be agnostic as to the root cause be it mental, neurological, chemical, hormonal, social, etc. Some seem especially attracted to social causes. That’s certainly possible but there are many other causes one should be open to.
And you should also be careful with how you understand things like hysteria. There is a lot of evidence that some kinds of chronic pain are internal to the brain. Someone with chronic lower back pain is having the pain center of their brain stimulated by errant internal neural impulse traffic. Not by traffic originating in the nerves of the lower back.
But! And this is important, the neurons in the brain’s pain center are being stimulated all the same. The suffering of the afflicted is the same in both cases.
Wait a minute -- there is a crucial piece you are missing here. The treatment for pain that is organic in nature is very different from the treatment for pain that neurogenically/psychologically mediated. It's essential to recognize this and treat those differences; otherwise, you risk getting people addicted to opiates or other pain medication. You risk doing more harm than good.
Likewise - it is essential to recognize the difference between (very rare) true trans people and people who are psychologically drawn to the idea of being trans for whatever reason. Again-- the treatment is WAY different. But, from the trans community, approaching a teen who claims to be trans with anything less than full 100% acceptance, and going forward with medical treatment is is virulently anti-trans. How does this make sense? This sudden epidemic in trans teens due to chemical exposure? Bullshit.
Yes, pain being experienced is certainly real no matter the cause. I have a friend who had a leg amputated and experiences ghost pain, and other sort of weird side effects.
However I think that pain caused by neurons being mis-wired in the brain is different than hysteria... especially if their is evidence that the hysteria has significantly increased due to some sort of external social influence.
Sure, this may become more of a problem, but I just can't get too worked up by it. People who realize their transgender face a helluva lot more challenges in their lives than the females they may be competing against athletically.
I recall some runners complaining about the advantage the South African athlete Oscar Pistorious had because of his prosthetic legs. My opinion was if they were that affronted they could go ahead and get their legs amputated and enjoy the same advantage he had (well, presumably without all the murder stuff).
I agree. But I also acknowledge that if I was the parent of a transgender child, or a parent of a girl who worked hard but got beat by a transgender athlete that had an advantage I would care a lot more about it.
Its also unfair that some kids are genetically gifted with muscles or hand eye coordination or speed or height.
The same as in the Pistorious case: deal with it. Because *no one* would cut off his legs to make up for Pistorious's advantage; they just had to deal with it.
Lots of things in life are unfair. Some athletes are gifted with better genes. Some have access to better coaching. Some have access to better technology (whether it's the best shoes or prosthetic legs).
That said, to compete against women, a trans woman can't just say "I'm a woman." She has to undergo significant treatment that, as Richard Gadsden points out, diminishes her physical advantages. She has to live as a woman and make it core to her life, with all the trauma that entails.
And really, how big a deal is this anyway? I'd like some statistics and not just anecdotes. Though speaking of anecdotes, years ago I met Renee Richards, the tennis player who famously transitioned to female. A very nice person! Granted she was not young when finally allowed to play women's tennis, but I note that her highest ranking was 20th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Richards
There's several layers of filtering that apply to high school sports though.
How many kids are going to be comfortable being openly trans? I crunched the numbers in my high school district (a moderately wealthy, fairly large suburban school district) and even with the "epidemic" of kids today identifying as trans, my calculations said there would only be about 45 trans kids at most across the whole district.
Now how many of those kids are going to be interested in playing sports? My high school offered about a dozen sports in each season, so not only does that dilute the numbers further, but I'd wager most of those kids probably don't want to play sports instead of doing other afterschool activities.
Now how many of THOSE kids are going to be devoted enough to play sports at a top tier competitive level instead of just for fun? What are they supposed to do if they want to play a team sport?
"How many kids are going to be comfortable being openly trans?"
The problem with this approach is that it assumes social aversion to "transness" remains unchanged when the same people who are claiming there's no risk of a significant number of trans athletes entering youth sports are simultaneously doing everything they can to both breakdown social aversions to it *and* make it easier to be categorized as trans by emphasizing self-ID with minimal (if any) outward commitment to establishing one's "transness." When you make something simultaneously less costly and easier to do, you get more of it, especially when there are rewards associated with it.
When I say "comfortable being openly trans" I mean: they themselves have acknowledged their trans identity, they are open about it with their families, and they are comfortable presenting as themselves in their environment. You need to clear all three bars as a trans kid or else you need to be extremely brave. In either case, then you have to apply the filters that I mentioned above. As trans acceptance becomes more common, those bars will lower, but there's still going to be a ceiling on how many trans people there really are, and it's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 2%.
In my high school of 2500 people, that means 50 kids across 4 grade levels. Apply filters from there.
The error that you're continuing to make here is conflating the "ceiling on how many trans people there really are," with the ceiling on how many people are willing to cynically identify as trans for the sake of gaining some advantage. While that percentage is probably less than 1% today, every advancement in trans acceptance and every facilitation of trans identification is going to cause that percentage to rise because the "cost" of publicly identifying as trans becomes less and less.
To put it another way, historically there was no advantage in American education to identifying one's self as having a learning disability. (In fact, it was probably a pretty clear disadvantage if you aspired to go to college because you'd likely be excluded from taking more advanced classes.) That changed dramatically between the 1970s and 1990s -- special assistance was introduced for students with learning disabilities and a wider range of conditions got identified as learning disabilities, including conditions that are much easier to fake one's way through a diagnosis. The result was a dramatic increase in the number of students with learning disabilities, which was initially attributed to past underdiagnosing of such disabilities, but the problem with that theory is the numbers just keep going up and up -- you can now find schools where approx. 40% of students are being categorized as having some form of learning disability. The very clear explanation is that some part of students are faking learning disabilities to gain advantages in terms of extra time on tests, etc., a point that was confirmed in the FBI investigation of the college admissions scandal a couple years back. (Here's some reporting from Vox on this issue: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/3/14/18265874/college-admissions-fraud-fbi-disability-accommodations ) It's ridiculous to think the exact same process isn't going to happen (or possibly isn't already happening) with student athletes for the same reason: when you simultaneously attach special rights to some condition and remove the negative stigma and social costs associated with that condition, you absolutely begin inviting people to fake the condition to gain the advantages associated with it.
Now this doesn't mean that the social stigma and abuse of trans individuals should continue for the sake of preserving girl's athletics! What it does mean is the eventual disappearance of natal females from the ranks of top competitors in many school sports unless bright line rules about who can compete in which divisions are maintained. I.e., you can't keep people from faking a condition, but you can say that, even if they actually have the condition, they don't get the special benefit, which then eliminates the incentive to fake the condition.
Like a lot of objections to trans rights, seems like you can deal with the problem of too transwomen crowding cis women out of sports if and when it actually becomes a problem.
The undefined term "fairness" is doing a lot of work there. It's not obvious to me that letting trans women and girls play in women's sports is objectively "unfair." They presumably will be playing by the same rules as anyone else.
Its worth noting that having gendered sports teams in the first place is about making life fair, not about making the game fair. We wanted to give women and girls an opportunity to play sports and recognized that there were a variety of reasons (including both ability and culture) unisex sports teams made this hard. Basically, it was a political decision. There is a lot of reason to believe that allowing trans women and girls to play on women's and girls' teams will advance the goal of making life fair, particularly if (as will likely be the case) trans women and girls remain a fairly significant minority of the people playing the sport.
Well, do you feel it was fair that East German women’s athletes were taking testosterone and other performance enhancers? Fairness to me means that no side has advantages beyond what are conveyed by natural talent, developed skill, or hard work. If you have two athletes, one of whom is willing to take PEDs and the other of whom is not (due to those drugs’ dangerous effects), the first athlete will have an advantage based on their willingness to take such drugs, which strikes many people as unfair since that’s not where many of us want advantages to come from. Now, some disagree and say that PEDs should be allowed because being willing to sacrifice one’s body for the sport *is* a legitimate basis for an advantage, and that’s a justifiable viewpoint! But I don’t think it’s consistent to say that most athletes can’t take hormones that allow them to compete better, while transwoman athletes (by taking drugs allowing them to compete in a more advantageous level of competition) can.
The problem with the East German women's athletes is that they were taking PEDs when it was against the rules to do so. Honestly, I think that we make too big a deal about PEDs (plenty of what people do to get better at sports is bad for them in various ways), but if the rules say "no PEDs," then you disqualify the team that took PEDs, because to do otherwise would be to disadvantage the team that followed the rules.
If the rules say "no transwomen," I'm fine disqualifying a team that sneaks a transwoman on the roster. They broke the rule and it would be unfair to the other teams that followed the rule by not adding transwomen to the roster. But that rule is just as arbitrary as any other rule in sports, and, in the same way you might add allow for designated hitters or decide that you are going to have gendered teams in the first place, you can decide that transwomen can play on the women's team.
Would it be unfair if there were one weight class in boxing? Tyson Fury would be the only champ! Or if all sports were mixed sex. What is not obvious to you is obvious to almost everyone else.
You're predicting that it will become a bigger issue - I'm skeptical. I don't think we're ever going to his a point where a substantial fraction of people are trans.
You talk about an arbitrary cut off - You don't have to set a cut off, you just have to occasionally look at the issue and weight the costs and benefits. Right now, it seems like we are pretty far from the costs outweighing the benefits.
Honestly, trans people playing sports isn't one of things that get me upset. As long as their is a governing body to make fair decisions, I am ok with it.
The same arguments about trans-women in sports could be made about tall people in basketball, or muscle density, etc...
I am not at advocating we do not let trans-women play sports and compete. As someone else said, apparently New Zealand sports bodies take into account a "Safety factor" in the case of Rugby.
I'll acknowledge that this is a wedge issue, and I'm open to the idea that, maybe in the grand scheme of things, sports is not the hill to die on on.
That being said, I don't see why having a single talented trans girl dominating the sport should be any more dispiriting than having someone like Michael Phelps or Gabby Douglas. Some people just have natural advantages in sports and are going to be better than the rest, no matter how hard the rest work. I say this as someone who ran track and wrestled in high school despite being incredibly bad at both.
The problem in America is people seem more interested in confrontation than fixing problems.
I live in the UK. I follow a contact sport (rugby) where trans players also add safety risks to the mix. The governing body (RFU) has a trans policy. As far as I know, no one is angry. People understand a difficult problem is being addressed. The RFU consulted the community when drafting the policy, I think they're currently in a second consultation to improve it.
I don't know, most of the people who seem to get really concerned about the issue of trans athletes seem to be the same people who do not otherwise seem to give a damn about women's sports and make fun of the WNBA.
Negative. The people who are most concerned about transgender athletes are the other female athletes. The very athletes who absolutely give a damn about women's sports, because they play women's sports. They are just a smaller population that everyone else.
Sure, the discourse is taken up by cultural warriors on both sides.... but that is completely different than who is really affected.
I'd imagine (not having a daughter of my own and not generally caring about sports played by people of any sex or gender) that not caring about women's professional sports is a wholly separate issue from not caring about the sports one's daughter participates in while in school.
I don’t think this is true. Jon Pike is a philosopher specializing in sport who is strongly concerned about trans athletes in women’s sports precisely because of how the issue threatens to undermine the whole rationale for the enterprise. And of course, the more activists push the issue, the more we should expect Mormons sympathetic to women’s sports to get alarmed.
Trans women after two/three years of hormone therapy do not have an advantage (two years in endurance sports, three in strength or speed sports). There has been quite a bit of research done on this question and the minimum required duration has ticked up as a result - note that one year is sufficient for someone who was not an athlete before transition, and the original research was about strength and endurance in the general population of trans women; it turns out that trans women who had already built muscle and fitness before transitioning take more time to lose it than the average. I wouldn't be surprised to see research showing that four or five years is necessary for an elite powerlifter who stays in elite-level training throughout transition.
I know a lot of people find that hard to believe, but trans women are not stronger or faster than cis women. I think the problem we have is that we're used to images of trans women on day one, not on day one thousand.
Kids before puberty don't have an advantage, which is why many sports have always been mixed sports up to around the age of 11. Even if the sport is segregated, there's no competitive problem with kids playing on the "other" team anyway.
If they do transition at 18, then they should be eligible to compete by the time they are a junior at college - and lots of college athletes only compete in their junior and senior years anyway, so it's perfectly reasonable to apply the two year rule.
That, of course, leaves the question of high school (and junior high) sports, which is a genuinely hard question. Hormonal transition isn't normally allowed for minors, which essentially all highschoolers are. If they started on puberty blockers at the start of puberty, then, of course, they don't accrue advantages over cis girls in the first place, and there is absolutely no good reason why a trans girl can't compete on the girls' team. If they don't start until later (either because they didn't come out before puberty, or because of difficulties accessing medication) then they will have some advantages that don't get reversed until they go onto hormone therapy as an adult. And if they aren't on puberty blockers at all, then they clearly have exactly the same physical advantages as a cis boy.
I don't know how to balance the desire to ensure that everyone has access to play sports and stay fit against the desire for an equal competitive field. This is a genuinely hard problem, especially for trans girls who are going to be able to compete in a couple of years' time when they have transitioned - if they can't play competitive sports, they have no chance of winning a scholarship, but if they can, they will unfairly dominate at 17, even though they will drop back to the level of the other girls by the time they are 20.
I think the sticking point here would be actually requiring hormone therapy to compete in the gender you identify with. From what I understand (which is not much so take it for what it's worth) you are considered a woman if you identify as a woman irregardless of whether you are on hormone therapy or otherwise taking any medical steps to transition biologically.
You're right, but the vast majority of transgender rights organisations accept the need for physical transition before trans women can be involved in high-level competitive sport. That is, they are a woman from the moment they come out, but that doesn't mean that they can compete in high-level sport.
The Olympics has a rule that most pro sports have adopted for when a trans woman is allowed to compete. There is some talk about changing it from sitting out (effectively) two years to (effectively) three years after some research on people who were at high levels of athletic fitness before transition showed that it took longer for their strength to drop to female-typical levels than it does for the general population of trans women.
The general consensus among both trans activists and sporting authorities is that at highly competitive levels, you need to sit out for 2-3 years while your body changes, and in recreational sports, we shouldn't try to put people off participation (too many people are too physically inactive as it is).
The Olympics has what is effectively a 2 year waiting period (the rule is that you have to get testosterone levels below 5nmol/L, which typically takes 6-12 months with higher fitness and physical activity levels at the higher end, and then you have to keep it there for a full year).
Most pro sports have adopted the same standard, just as they adopt the WADA standards for drugs (which also originate with the Olympics). The Olympics allows sports to adopt a different standard if they can evidence that; Rugby is currently looking at doing so - one proposal is an extra year of reduced testosterone.
I do not see trans activists complaining about those standards.
What I do see is a lot of people thinking that the Olympic standards are excessive for high school - but "high school" is a pretty broad range, from some events where people are competing for NCAA scholarships to others that are played entirely for the fun of participation and as an incentive to maintain fitness; some sort of compromise where trans women can participate in participation-oriented sport but not compete in competition-oriented sport until they reach the relevant standards would be one that I think most would go along with.
Not wishing to engage in pedantry about hormone levels, but having done a quick check on google: "In 2015, the IOC ruled that transgender athletes who identify as female could compete on female teams if their testosterone levels were below ten nanomoles per liter for at least 12 months before the competition. In 2019, World Athletics lowered the maximum level to five nanomoles per liter."
I make no claims of expertise and stand to be corrected on that, but I believe part of the criticism of the Olympic standards has been that the 10nmol/L level standard is still very considerably higher than female typical, and actually lies still within the normal range that is seen in males (albeit at the very bottom end of it). So it is at least possible for competitors in some sports to be qualified in terms of Olympic standards, yet they have not really reduced their testosterone levels to a point where they are going to see significant muscle loss. So they are operating in effect as very low testosterone males, not as trans people who have really crashed their testosterone levels for a prolonged period of time.
Side-note: I believe the objection in MMA also is regards to the greater bone density in males, which lets them take hits better and hit harder, and is unaffected by the reduction in testosterone.
As far as high school sports, I'm not sure why people can't come up with a statistical adjustment to account for the effects of male puberty in those sports that would allow that, e.g., athletics, cycling, etc. That way you can have the "inclusion" while still ensuring that the competition recognizes female physical and technical excellence in that particular sport in the winner. If the trans competitor manages to beat the competition even after the statistical adjustment then fair enough, we know that was a really outstanding performance and just one that reflects having gone through a different physical development pathway to the rest of the field.
Having said that, that is only going to work for non-physical contact sports. Having played high school rugby at a decent level myself, the idea of letting any boy on my old school rugby team switch to playing against girls would be just a recipe for injury (which is why I think rugby has been quite sensibly looking at this issue carefully, and I believe has banned trans-women in international women's rugby based on the science as it applies to elite level rugby).
Honestly, people should just play a bit more competitive chess. Can't think of any reason why it should matter at all in that.
Progressives LOVE to find "disproportionate" shares of things then claim unfairness. (In a hypothetical city, 28% of police stops are of black people but they're only 22% of the population. This gets taken as bulletproof evidence of systematic racism.)
But when there's a clear, obvious advantage for trans women athletes in women's sports, these same progressives will say "Well trans women don't win 100% of the time so it's fair."
I can only ascribe this view to willful ignorance.
If there was a clear, obvious advantage for trans women athletes in women's sports, why don't they win a lot?
There are no trans women in the WNBA, or in the top 100 of women's tennis. There was one at the last Olympics, in weightlifting, a sport that people only paid attention to because there was a trans woman in it. There are none in World Cup skiing, none in gymnastics, none on the pro golf tours. There is exactly one trans woman who plays in their country's top-level soccer league, and that's in Argentina, not a particularly highly-ranked league.
I think you just need a few examples to prove the point though. We're dealing with a small base. CeCe Telfer went from 390th place in the men's division in 2017 to winning the women's division in 2019. She was ruled ineligible from competing in the women's trials this summer but I that illustrates the relative difference in performance.
I think she proves the point in my longer comment. You need to be on hormones for about two years (it takes 6-12 months for testosterone levels to drop below 5 nmol/L and about a year before the physical changes to be sufficient). If you don't make people sit out for two years, then of course they will have big advantages during those two years, and the NCAA should apply the usual rules that the Olympics and other sports apply.
She clearly hasn't completed the athletic transition, so of course she has an advantage. Almost no-one denies that testosterone is a big advantage, and it takes time to get it out of the body.
Whether she will be competitive as a woman, though, we shouldn't take too seriously her performances as a freshman. Plenty of great athletes were pretty mediocre in competion against 21-22 year olds when they were 18.
But I don't think it does; unless I'm missing something about this specific case. She started transitioning four years ago and was ruled ineligible in June at for the trials.
I think we're aligned more broadly though. In this case - seems clear she shouldn't have been able to compete back in 2019. I think that's the bigger point. Similar situation happened in Connecticut.
Of course there is a clear, obvious advantage for men.
Trans women are not men.
I don't just mean that ideologically, I mean biologically. They have female-typical endocrine systems because they take oestrogen and either a testosterone antagonist or have had an orchidectomy. This changes their athletic abilities.
All pro/Olympic level sports require trans women to reach female-typical levels of hormones (which typically takes 6-12 months, with athletic trans women towards the upper end of that range) and then stay there for a year before they start competing against cis women, and continue to stay there throughout their time as competitors. Since those are normal levels for trans women, that's not a particular challenge. This removes the athletic advantages that men have over women in the vast majority of cases.
There is some evidence that some sports might need a longer period - particularly those that are very dependent on strength. The IOC deliberately allows sports to apply stricter criteria if appropriate to that sport. AIUI, rugby union is currently studying whether it needs to apply a stricter rule for exactly this reason.
There is exactly one Olympic sport that does not apply any requirement for trans women: that's equestrianism, where men and women compete as equals anyway.
Trans women are men. One necessarily must be male in order to be a trans woman. The term makes no sense otherwise.
Women are not hormone levels. Women are female humans. Males cannot become females, and even the simulacra they can become are different from the real thing in a thousand ways.
Incorrect. The differences start in the womb, and then really accelerate during puberty. Andrew Sullivan had an excellent podcast on the topic a while back. (6-18-21)
Or you can check out Carole Hooven's book on testosterone
Semenya is not a trans woman, though! And I'm not even all that clear that she is intersex. She's a woman with elevated testosterone, and there has never been a medical disclosure that makes clear why that is, whether it's an intersex condition (in which case she is an intersex woman), or not. Either way, she is a cis woman; she was identified as female at birth and has never rejected that identity.
Obviously, having elevated testosterone levels is an athletic advantage, but it doesn't really matter why she has elevated testosterone levels in a sporting context. Having a maximum testosterone level for all women would make far more sense than having different rules depending on the medical cause for that testosterone level. Plenty of female athletes have some sort of elevated testosterone level.
I think I disagree with your last sentences. Caster being born with elevated testosterone is like Michael Phelps having freakishly long arms—a natural advantage of the kind world class athletes are bound to have. Letting athletes elevate their testosterone, in the other hand, gives an incentive for unethical athletes to improve their performance. It creates unfairness in the way an inborn advantage doesn’t.
Wait, do you think I am a progressive lol? It just seems like it is not obvious if trans athlete have a big advantage post-transition. Like Richard says below, I would expect them to win a lot more shit if they did.
I don't think the concept "dead last at the Olympics" means what you think it means. That is not a randomly selected population, rather, it's the population of athletes filtered down to the top performer(s) in a country.
I'm not saying trans athletes do or d it not have an advantage; I do not know. I'm just saying coming in last in an Olympic contest is not proof either way.
I don't really know where I stand on this either. I just heard a lot about this athlete in the run up to the Olympics and people made it out like she had this huge advantage and I was surprised at how poorly she did.
She was the number one junior in New Zealand, then quit lifting entirely because she couldn't face competing while pretending to be a man. We have no idea how good she would have been in her prime; she wasn't mediocre for a pro, she was an elite junior who gave up before reaching the pro level for non-athletic reasons.
The age thing is fair comment - to reach 7th in the world in your forties is pretty unusual.
The trans sports issue is the new trans bathroom issue in that it’s being significantly overblown (“men will pretend to be trans women to attack your daughters in the bathroom” / “men will pretend to be trans women to beat your daughters in sports”) because not enough people understand it. First of all, because the vast majority of trans women aren’t interested in competing in sports anyways. Second of all, because (especially at the school level) a trans kid who is either on puberty blockers or who is taking steps for medical transition doesn’t have the kind of biological-sex-based advantages everyone is so worried about.
By this argument, there's a double standard on all minority rights, because there are more people who want the right to be racist than people who want the right to not have racism done against them.
You obviously have to weigh 1) how much you believe that there's a basic right to dignity affected by the standard, 2) how burdensome the issue is to the majority, and 3) how much it affects the minority.
If you believe using inclusive language that covers trans men when discussing reproductive health is a big burden and that making trans people navigating medical care identify as cis to get relevant healthcare is a small burden that doesn't affect their dignity, than yeah, things are out of control. But it's not because there's a double standard, it's because you don't know any trans people who've had to deal with doctors who are bad dealing with trans health.
There's actually not more people who want to be racist, but your point is taken.
And you are exactly right about weighing of the different issues.
For instance, I a disinclined to support gender neutral phrases in place of "pregnant women". The number of men who get pregnant is infitesimal, and I have to imagine the effort to change the language of 99.99999% of the population to avoid the phrase pregnant women is silly.
However, there is an argument to be made that not letting transgender women play sports is a lot more significant, and I am actually inclined to let trans-women play high school and college sports and let sports body sort out the medical issues of that. Though I do have sympathy for the cis-women who might feel differently.
I am going to guess that a trans-person who has transitioned knows there way around the medical community and has the experience to get the right medical help. You know, since being trans required continued medical support for monitoring of hormones and significant surgery.
I mean, if Im Trans... I have had a year of counseling, hormone blockers, and then surgery, I go to the doctor to have follow up appointments, and then I have gotten pregnant, I might just be familiar with the medical community to know where to get understanding and needed medical care. At this point, I suspect... if it were me.... having to explain to the nurse or doctor that I am having issue X as a man, might not be the biggest thing in the world.
Then again.... maybe we should just remove the gender connotation from words used to describe biological traits.
Use Pregnant Females to describe people with XX issues.... and the word women to describe gender identity. So you could be a male man or a female man, or a female woman or a female man.
Especially considering the whole debate comes down to language.
I am adding that Richard Gadson above made a strong argument as to why the terminology is important, and I am actually sympathetic to accurate medical descriptions (people with uterous or people with breasts or people who are pregnant) in the context of medical care.
The more I think about it, the more using this language makes sense on medical forms and in medical journals.
It's not even being applied uniformly in those spaces though. The Lancet recently got called out for using such inclusive language with regards to women ("bodies with vaginas") but not the equivalent for men. But more to the point, I would think that transgender man or woman is going to be significantly more useful for medical forms than "bodies with vaginas" or "bodies with prostates".
Transgender athletes could really affect elite sports. Yes, there aren’t that many transgender people, but there is only one olympic champion. Champions tend to be genetic outliers because being the best in the world isn’t normal. Lots of women beat me at pickleball, but the best men would always beat the best women.
The winning time in the 2019 Georgia boys high school 400m championship was 48.08. I chose that event at random. In the 100m, the Georgia male high school champion ran 10.51. The winning time in the 2020 womens olympics was 48.36 in the 400 and 10.61 in the 100. A generic 17 or 18 year old male state champion could be the women’s world champion, in events where performance peaks in your mid twenties and high school athletes rarely make the olympics and almost never make the olympic finals.
That's assuming that any male athlete could declare themselves female and still compete, which is not currently the case and is not a proposal from anyone who knows anything about sports. Trans women have to undergo hormonal transition, which wipes out loads of muscle mass, which means they run a lot slower. That's why there are rules on this, and that Georgia high school champion would not be returning those times after transition.
There are people who know nothing about sports who make some completely ridiculous statements about sports. I have seen a bunch of feminists (who never watch sports) make claims that the only reason that women have separate teams from men is because of sexism, and if women were allowed to compete, then all the teams would be 50:50. People at that level of knowledge of sports do make outlandish claims about trans women.
I hadn't heard as much about hormonal transition wiping out loads of muscle mass - especially if an athlete was exercising to maintain it. What is the expected loss rate in those situations?
The studies vary, a lot, in part because a lot of them are done on non-athletes.
IIRC, the best evidence is on grip strength (not directly relevant to sport, but clearly related to muscle mass/strength), where there is very little change in the first nine months and then it drops about 1% per month for about two years, to about 80% of the original value (IIRC from the meta-analysis, the rate of about 1% per month is solid, but the stop-point and thus the total change is not well-evidenced because most studies were too short). Average cis women's grip strength is about 80% of cis men's.
I find it equally possible that we get some good regulations in place to prevent trans women who have an unfair advantage from competing and everyone's happy. As I mentioned up thread ... the CeCe Telfer situation is a good example. She won the 2019 women's Div. II 400m but was just ruled ineligible in June for the Olympic trials. Seems clear should she should have also been ruled ineligible for the prior 2019 race.
Most people also got the bathroom thing totally backwards. The anti-trans people wanted women to be harassed in bathrooms if they don’t look feminine enough, but *also* wanted extremely masculine looking people to use the women’s room. That just seems like a recipe for harassment.
Yeah, in practice the Fox News-ification of the bathroom issue mostly meant that the number of butch cis women being harassed for trying to use a public restroom skyrocketed.
I get the concern but is this really a problem? How many female athletes will ever compete against a trans woman?
I grant there's some level of unfairness, but it was also "unfair" to have female tennis players compete against the Williams sisters in their prime, because (in part) of their "unfair" genetic endowment.
This always seemed like an issue that is legitimate (I've have cis-female friends lose podium positions in ultramarathons to tans women) but also I think is solvable if we were actually interested in solving the problem (rather than scoring rhetorical points). We already have various models for separating competitions into sub-categories roughly based on ability. In (non-elite) triathlon you compete based on age group (because a 65 year old is obviously not going to be competitive with a bunch of people in their 20s-30s) for example.
It wouldn't be immediately obvious how you do it (even triathlon age groups break down into men's/women's) but maybe something like how football leagues work in Europe. There is no gender segregation but you have a "premier league" with the best teams/individual athletes and then a series of other leagues which still have their own tournaments and championships. And everyone competes in the most competitive league they can actually win in.
The Republican solution of making people play based on their birth sex doesn’t make sense though if you are trying to get rid of an advantage. Trans men would still be able to compete in the cis-women category under proposed legislation. The only solution that makes sense would be to have a category where both birth sex and current gender identity is cis-women and an everyone else category.
Trans women after transitioning enough don't have an advantage. But it takes time, and high school isn't enough time.
For the Olympics, or the WNBA, or whatever, telling them to sit out two or three years would be fine. For high school, that's your entire time at high school, and you aren't allowed to start until 18 (or 16 in some states).
There's a reason why there's almost no trans women at the Olympic or pro level in sports - once they have lost the advantage of all that testosterone, trans women have no physical advantages and all the social disadvantages of being trans, plus the forced two year gap in training tends to end their careers.
Exactly. A 6' trans woman has no advantage over a 6' cis woman.
This will mean that trans women will be slightly more common in the higher weight classes for boxing and weightlifting and so on, as trans women are, on average, a bit bigger than cis women. But that doesn't make the competition unfair.
“Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport.”
If, as you say, most high school athletes haven’t completed transition until basically after high school then it seems like a blanket birth-sex female, current identity female sports category makes a lot of sense.
Leave it to the olympics or pro sports to measure testorone level or whatever they are currently doing.
Depends how competitive the specific high school sports are.
At lower levels, there are two values to sport - participation and competition. You need to balance excluding some people from participation against ensuring that the competition is fair.
I'd probably go for a rule that the top competitive level of HS sports is restricted, but not JV sports or small-school sports. That will cost some trans girls their chance at a college scholarship, but I don't see how to avoid that problem.
Also, if they have puberty blockers early enough, then trans girls never undergo male puberty and never accrue an advantage in the first place. You could certainly include that fraction.
Actually it’s not just trans women, there are women born female who have elevated testosterone and as I understand it they are now required to take testosterone-supressing drugs to qualify. Clearly a transwoman would be subject to these same rules, as well as the rules about being on hormone treatments for some number of years before becoming eligible. The ideal solution for school sports would be puberty-suppressing drugs which would put trans girls on the same level as cis girls.
Someone who is born a man and goes on testosterone blockers as a teen or adult will still have physical advantages over someone who was born a woman, e.g. being taller on average but also I think other things?
Chappelle is clearly more pro trans than the majority of America. He would vote for the Equality Act. He’s not being canceled for saying that trans people shouldn’t have rights; he’s being canceled for essentially saying “sure, trans women are women, but…”
I think a lot of people are having trouble understanding why the words are of paramount importance. Feels like an overwhelming concern only for people who have no material concerns.
I like Dave Chappelle, but I don't think that clip of him calling Ohio a state full of poor white people who love heroin would play very well in a Senate race in Ohio.
Like you, I watched "The Closer" solely so that I could make my own decision about The Discourse. My verdict? Chapelle spent a gratuitous portion of his time (over 50%??) poking fun at trans people. It's clear that he's been deeply affected by the pseudo-cancellation attempts from the LGBTQ+ community so far, and his reaction has been to double down + make a few friends from within that population that are on his side. That alone is reason enough to oppose "the doomed politics of shunning"- it doesn't work, it backfires.
You say he's a comic and that stand-up is not political; I couldn't disagree more. Comics have a long history of political commentary that does in fact deeply impact culture over time. Google "reverse racism comic" and see a standup bit that is shown in DEI trainings to dismiss the idea that one can be racist against white people and you'll recall how sticky some of these ideas can be. So, for someone like Chapelle, he has a lot of influence over how a lot of people approach these issues, whether he likes it or not (I think he does, as he chose to spend half of his time on this single topic).
My personal belief is that a segment of the population is more or less born gay, and an even smaller portion of the population is born with such an extreme mismatch between their biological sex and their gender-associated traits/personality that transitioning makes a lot of sense. These folks are entitled to respect, decency, and if they wish, privacy. They are not entitled to never be swept up in cultural commentary, nor is someone expressing that they disagree with a trans person necessarily transphobic. I am sensitive to the fact that for trans people in particular, they are constantly faced with people who don't "believe" them, or portray them as overly dramatic. Most of them just want to live their life in peace (and I can't imagine too many opt for the urinal if there's a stall available).
The activists within this group, of whom the most extreme are the most visible, have made it their life's mission to shift hearts and minds on the topic of gender, to convince everyone they meet to think about gender in the same way they do. I believe their motivations are actually good- they are trying to make the world a safer, more accepting place for others like them. When folks with a platform, like Dave, use that platform to push back, it of course feels like not just a defeat but an existential threat. Of course they will push back even harder. The response that got me thinking most was Terra Field's Twitter thread listing the names of Black and Hispanic trans women who've been murdered over the past year, pointing out they are not offended because they are dead. Her point is clear: platforming influencers who delegitimize transness as a state of being increase the likelihood that trans people's lives will be taken violently.
Here is the thing though.... I think Dave Chappelle actually tried to address this, though not directly enough because no one is talking about it. Dave's bit about DaBaby (who, full disclosure, I'd never heard of) was that people are enraged over his homophobic comments, but *no one is speaking out about his murdering of people.* What most directly caused the death of these trans women- Jokes Dave Chapelle made, or people choosing to pull out a weapon and murder other people? Murder is on the rise in our nation and it's taboo to talk about it- why? Many of the same activists who want to deplatform Chapelle also want to defund the police- do they care about saving lives or not?
In the end, I didn't find the special all that funny (I chuckled at his MLK impressions, directing people to oil up for the Pride parade). I found it pretty juvenile but if that's people's jam, ok. I think people who are trying to influence the discourse have every right to speak out against his views, share their own views, write their own anti-Chapelle comedy routines, etc. I think the focus on Sarandos instead of Chapelle is telling- people don't want to engage in dialogue, they want opposing voices silenced entirely. They want the gatekeepers of pop culture to pick a side. They're entitled to advocate for that too, and I'm entitled to shrug it off.
One final note... over the past year or so, I've started to move to the "gone too far" end of that Pew survey. The exploding number of teens who identify as trans or non-binary sure seems to indicate this is more than people expressing their innate traits and has become a social trend. I would not have a problem with this if it weren't so often leading to life-altering medication and surgery on minors. I am not a TERF, but I am a feminist, and I feel strongly that both men and women can feel free to express themselves in any way they wish without needing to alter their biological state to match centuries-old stereotypes about what range of personalities or interests are acceptable for each biological sex. If Chapelle were set on using his platform to challenge the pro-trans orthodoxy, I wish he'd done it in a more thoughtful way. But that's not his schtick.
"The exploding number of teens who identify as trans or non-binary sure seems to indicate this is more than people expressing their innate traits and has become a social trend. I would not have a problem with this if it weren't so often leading to life-altering medication and surgery on minors."
You're being much, much more charitable than I am inclined to be.
I must admit that I find this incomprehensible, because I can't fathom wanting to be a woman. Thus, I'm not about to judge anyone who feels trapped in their own body, so much so that it requires radical modification to alleviate that feeling.
The problem is that the social aspects of this and how they're interfering with effectively helping those who have those feelings is absolutely *damning* towards the activist class.
Questioning a person's feelings is a necessary part of all medical treatment, period, and most especially psychological treatment, which should and must be the frontline treatment for gender dysphoria. Yet we have probably 80% of the "trans activist + allies" community saying that any questioning is profoundly hateful and attempting to destroy the careers of those medical professionals who say it's needed.
Mark my words... we will soon see a great number of 20-something girls and boys who have immense regrets about body modification that cannot be undone and a massive attendant uptick in suicides, all because this community is so damningly insecure that it can't even tolerate proper medical evaluation and treatment of its (potential) members.
I can forgive a lot, but to willfully make this problem worse in every way is not forgivable, and most of today's activist community is doing just that, damn them.
Yeah… I am sympathetic to these concerns for sure. My instinct is that this has tipped over into social contagion territory, which does change the calculus a lot. I think a lot of adult activists are projecting their own struggles onto teens- they think, “wow my life would have been so much better if I’d been able to transition prior to puberty, so I am supportive of others being able to.” Their decision to transition was so difficult and complex and came as adults, they can’t imagine teenagers making the same choice unless it’s based in innate traits. My cousin, who is trans, once posted a meme comparing the exploding trend to the rise in left-handed students after teachers stopped forcing people to use their right hand. To her, they’re equivalently innate, and the spike is just the latent occurrence that has heretofore been suppressed culturally. My instinct is to disagree, but this is arguably unknowable. In the end, I defer to people to choose for themselves- EXCEPT when it comes to allowing or encouraging life-altering choices in minors. I agree that intensive psychological assistance should be the first, second, and third step for gender dysphoric youth, and medical interventions should be minimized/delayed to as close to adulthood as possible. Adults can knock themselves out and I’ll happily use any pronouns they like. (Though I do find singular “they” tedious but that’s my change-aversion.)
“wow my life would have been so much better if I’d been able to transition prior to puberty, so I am supportive of others being able to.”
Again, I am sympathetic, but that does not mean there should be no obstacles, no questioning, no medical or psychological evaluation. And right now, the state of practice pulls the trigger on puberty blockers almost immediately. It also seems, based on what I'm reading, to treat psychological screening and treatment as pro forma options to be breezed through to get to the main event, hormone and surgical treatments.
I have no doubt that this has something to do with how lucrative the last is, in particular, and the fact that the activists are lining up to support a deeply exploitative and potentially murderous medical practice is, again, a damning indictment of their humanity and judgment.
"My cousin, who is trans, once posted a meme comparing the exploding trend to the rise in left-handed students after teachers stopped forcing people to use their right hand. To her, they’re equivalently innate, and the spike is just the latent occurrence that has heretofore been suppressed culturally."
This is patently ludicrous, and I think we all know this. Educators and parents historically had to take deeply invasive, borderline-abusive measures to prevent large numbers of children from writing with their left hands. The same was true, to a slightly lesser extent, with same-sex attractions. It took real work on the part of societies to suppress those inclinations, because they are prevalent.
Your cousin is engaged in heavily motivated reasoning; some of it, I'm sure, is the altruistic motives you described above. But I'm equally certain that much of this sentiment stems from "if more folks are like us we won't be so alone, so vulnerable."
I'm sure no one is thinking this explicitly, but the undercurrent seems to be that a few mistaken transitions is an acceptable price to pay for being part of a larger community whose interests will be taken serious. They desperately *want* for it to be true that a few percent of the population are trans, instead of well under one percent.
Again, this well-meaning but completely *wrong* desire is going to lead, within a decade, to a huge number of young people with deep regrets and a great, great amount of suffering and death. All avoidable.
"I agree that intensive psychological assistance should be the first, second, and third step for gender dysphoric youth, and medical interventions should be minimized/delayed to as close to adulthood as possible. Adults can knock themselves out and I’ll happily use any pronouns they like."
Agreed in full.
"(Though I do find singular “they” tedious but that’s my change-aversion.)"
I was trained that the third-person they is the proper non-gendered singular in English, so completely comfortable with it.
I think it’s possible that maybe in the future, people will become less attached to their genders and broadly identify as queer. Would be interesting. But teenagers are stupid and irrational, and should generally not be trusted to make any kind of permanent life decision.
" Yet we have probably 80% of the "trans activist + allies" community saying that any questioning is profoundly hateful and attempting to destroy the careers of those medical professionals who say it's needed"
This strikes me as bullshit. The people trying to destroy medical professionals are the people who want it to be legally considered child abuse to give kids puberty blockers or hormone replacements. Every conversation about underage transgender people I've ever seen the pro-trans side emphasized that kids go through psychological counseling first to explore those feelings before they move on to discussions with medical practitioners about stopping their puberty with hormone blockers.
I do not care what it "strikes you as". I am not here to pop whatever bubble has insulated you from the discourse of the past year.
I will simply point out that numerous medical professionals going on record to say that standard treatments in the US proceed far too quickly to puberty blockers, then hormones, then transition surgeries have been positively savaged by the activist community, and many have lost jobs or suffered damage to careers and practices.
Go read more. Until then, don't bother replying to me.
If you think "probably 80% of" anyone in a group is doing something outrageous, there's probably a problem with your perceptions somewhere- either you're hyperbolizing the size of the outraged party or you're underplaying the awfulness of the thing they're outraged over.
Chappelle had a joke about how elizabeth smart wasn't smart because her captors didn't tie her up all the time and she didn't escape, he had a joke about how kobe bryant's rape victim couldn't have been raped because she had other men's semen on her underwear, he had another joke about how Michael Jackson performing oral sex on children he invited to his residence made him a good host.
I find this all very weird as someone familiar with his standup, he says incredibly offensive things all the time, if you don't like offensive humor he isn't your guy. Its weird to me that saying your team terf and that transwomen are like wearing blackface is worse than any of that.
I don't think people are against "offensive humor" - they're against humor that "punches down" a/k/a humor that's offensive to people who are oppressed and thus sanctified. Elizabeth Smart is white, it's fine for Chappelle to punch her.
I am a suburban father with middle school aged children. The prevalence of identity issues in school is honestly shocking. I've been supportive of most left wing causes throughout my life and have consistently voted for democrats but the identity and gender politics of the woke left is a bridge too far. Just last night I said to my wife that while I would never vote for him I'm starting to understand why some people voted for Trump. If the democrats keep going down this road they can count me out.
For example, my elementary daughter's social studies book discusses Native Americans in our state, and the topics are very measured and historical. But there were two sentences that stuck out like sore thumbs within the chapter (about 1 hours worth of reading out-loud). First, in the religion and customs section, it noted that some Native Americans believed in dual spirits and that both genders could be in one body. It had no flow with the previous sentence and nothing was added after. I thought it was really hamfisted in there, and honestly unnecessary.
The second sentence was when the Spanish came and forced the Native Americans onto the missions and to accept Catholicism. Another forced sentence along the lines of, "The Indians were not allowed to practice dual spirit belief." Yes, the book keeps calling Native Americans "Indians," probably more often than not, but we *have* to put in two sentences about how they were woke.
I will never ever vote for Trump or any one like him, but I can see why many other parents in my school do because, to them, this is a cultural push that really didn't need to be in our elementary child's social studies.
The issue is not that they’re fake, it’s that the responses are very much real.
The correct reply here would be something along the lines of, “What the hell is wrong with you people?! You need to get your whole family in the therapy immediately!!”
Having read a couple of Prudence columns over the last year or two, Slate needs to fire everyone who’s ever moonlit that desk and blacklist them all from journalism forever.
No one who believes the shit those columnists believe can possibly be relied on to provide impartial and accurate information or analysis on any topic.
Fair point. I'll never forget this line from the most recent departed Prudie (Daniel Lavery I think?): "private property is stupid and fake" in justifying theft. Sadly, he wasn't even the only Slate advice columnist to endorse theft. I stopped reading that site a while ago.
His accusers do have holes in their stories though, so that's not an unreasonable position. As a comparison to Matt's piece here, I'd wager that a substantial portion of Americans and even a majority of black people believe in MJ's innocence.
I think what you said perfectly illustrates Matt's broader point. But Chappelle also had like a five-minute bit about certain body parts belonging to children that I am not willing to write down explicitly.
His point was that the HBO documentary was gross and offensive and he used outdated stereotypes to make it. Somehow everyone seems to understand that. But when it comes to the LGBTQ jokes, suddenly a bunch of people—most of whom are not LGTB or Q—take everything at face value and assume bad faith.
Chappelle's over-arching point was that sometimes LGBTQ people invoke white privilege and are themselves punching down or otherwise overlooking the plight of other minorities in pursuit of their own goals. He has a whole bit about a car full of LGBTQ people that illustrates that worldview perfectly and yah, it uses some dated and offensive imagery. Yet, somehow that crosses the line, whereas using the same construction in the context of pedophilia is just ducky. (For the record I thought both were illuminating and hilarious.)
I think the reason is that Chappelle is incredibly funny, even to joyless scolds, so they cannot credibly condemn him or his specials in their entirety.
Gender is an ancient category, sanctified by nature. Every one of my ancestors has successfully reproduced as a male or a female. Trans people stand athwart history and evolution. I do not doubt that gender dysphoria is real. No one would take on all the shit and contempt that trans people deal with for shits and giggles. Though real, gender dysphoria is a disorder, a failure of the mind to harmonize with the body, a rejection of the constraints that nature imposes. Those who suffer from gender dysphoria deserve sympathy, but their plight should never be normalized, much less glamorized. The urban fad for gender fluidity is dangerous.
Teenagers who are unhappy with their birth gender should try really hard to deal with it before transitioning. Things might get better, and it’s best to try to harmonize with nature before making irreversible changes to one’s body. Any person born with a disorder, be it depression, anxiety, dyslexia or a speech impediment, should try really hard to manage and treat it. I stutter and stuttering has really hurt my life. The world would be easier for me if everyone stuttered or if stuttering were glamorous, but those are velleities. The best course for me is to treat my disorder and try to stutter as little as possible while asking for patience when it takes me longer than normal to get something out. I well understand that this is an imposition on my listeners and that things would be better for everyone if I always spoke fluently.
Some people stutter so horribly that they learn sign language and join the deaf community. I feel sorry for them because that choice is very limiting. Similarly, performing a gender for which one lacks the essential reproductive equipment is also limiting. At a minimum, it destroys the ability to become a biological parent and drastically narrows your dating pool. Still, just as I understand that speaking could be so painful that one acts deaf, I understand that being masculine could be so painful that one chooses to act like a woman. This is a fraught adaptation to a disorder and should not be anyone’s ideal.
Nothing that exists ultimately comes from elsewhere than "nature". These arguments sound all too similar to "natural law" arguments against homosexuality, especially the part about destroying the ability to become a biological parent and drastically narrowing one's dating pool. As a gay man I have a much smaller pool of potential partners than I would if I pretended to be straight, in addition to biological reproduction being very unlikely. I still wouldn't trade it for anything, and don't want anyone to feel sorry for me. The tolerance you offer trans people is a cold gruel, dependent on their wearing a metaphorical hair shirt and beating their chests in unceasing agony. I think trans people – who are not doomed to sorrow but can become happy, fulfilled and at peace through transition – are no more or less part of the beautifully complex tapestry of humanity as anyone else, and enrich the world accordingly. Thinking in complex and sometimes difficult ways about what gender is, where it comes from, and how to free everyone to have the best life they can, is not a burden on society, but a valuable challenge.
Ultimately, whether being trans is “fraught” is an empirical question. I’ve read that suicide rates amoung trans people are very high, any characteristic that carries with it a high risk of wanting to self-liquidate is fraught.
Homosexuality was certainly fraught 50 years ago and has become less fraught as tolerance has increased. I’ll certainly concede that greater tolerance will make being trans less fraught, but that does not mean that trans people would be as happy as cis people or that most people who feel gender dysphoria should transition.
At a minimum, we lack robust data to prove that most people who transition are happy. Shouldn’t that be grounds for caution?
I think you're trying to make a case that being trans might just make people unhappy innately. But if society defines being trans as "abnormal", I don't know how you'd, as an empirical matter, ever separate the experience of being trans from the experience of being trans in a society that defines being trans as abnormal.
Why isn't our default view more libertarian - letting trans people do what they want to do and not using the power of the state to limit their choices?
I should think that people who are distressed and unhappy at their body would have an elevated risk of suicide, regardless of whether it’s normalized or not.
Also, perhaps trans people are biologically more prone to depression. Who knows? Who cares? Women appear to be more prone to it than men as well, but generally we don’t consider that a sign that femaleness is unnatural and must be corrected.
The was just a piece in the NYT on considerable research showing that liberals aren’t as happy as conservatives. That doesn’t make being a liberal wrong. It just makes you grouchy.
Much like how we don't need the first amendment to protect already popular speech, if "freedom" means anything, it's the ability to do things that the mainstream may not agree with--even if there is a risk of negative consequences to the individual.
Of course, as a society we should review and possibly limit behavior (freedom) with marked negative externalities, but this doesn't really seem like one..?
-I don’t think our value as humans is directly tied to an ability to have heterosexual sex that results in pregnancy and birth.
-if we want to elevate what nature has created and “sanctified,” nature has also created, for example, the ability for an individual with XY genotype to be insensitive to testosterone, so they have all the secondary sexual characteristics of women. They’re just not able to have children. Nature created this too!
-I don’t think anyone’s choice of gender expression has a bearing on my choice to live as a cisgendered, heterosexual woman with a queer vibe. I like it that people get their choice in gender and sexual expression, including me. Why not?
I think it’s important to be really precise in where we aim our discomfort and our criticism. You can aim it at trans people, or you can aim it at trans activism and its consequences. David Abbott reads more like the former, and MY reads more like the latter.
I thought the David Abbot post above that you responded to read quite neutral. My initial inclination was to "like" both of your posts. They both came across to me as well considered.
I certainly agree that there is far more to life than procreation, I am
44 and only have one kid, if I thought that spreading my genes were the be all and end all, I would have many more. My sexuality flows from an ancient reproductive impulse but has become largely decoupled from it. I don’t want to get anyone pregnant.
Homosexual acts are a fine exercise in mutual masturbation. I do not use that term derisively, I think that sharing sexual joy and intimacy with reproduction off the table is very civilized and should be taught and encouraged.
A teenager in a civilized country who experiments with same sex partners risks very little. They don’t even risk pregnancy. A practical father might rather his teenage daughter fool around with other girls than boys— less risk of disease, pregnancy and rape. Furthermore, a young woman can experiment with same sex partners without greatly compromising her future ability to date cud men and get pregnant.
Nature certainly creates gender ambiguous people, just like it creates trisomy 21 (down’s syndrome) or people with speech impediments. Meiotic division often misfires— half of all pregnancies end in a spontaneous abortion, and most of those embryos had worse defects than Downs.
Just as Downs people will always be a small minority because they are usually infertile and require care to survive, trans gender people will always be a minority because fertility would collapse if too many people were trans. Being trans is necessarily a fairly rare exception to the gendered categories that nature has imposed.
To your third point - that's why trans people in women's sports is one of the big wedge issues. The other is children just out of puberty being encouraged and / or allowed to start transitioning. Neither is a purely a live-and-let-live position
Sounds like you think no one has ever told kids that maybe they shouldn’t transition, and we need to start doing that before doing transition immediately when they first mention it. I could see how that would be good advice in a hypothetical world where this is what is happening.
But this bears about as much connection to reality as the idea that obese people maybe haven’t yet heard that obesity is bad and maybe we should spend some time trying to talk them out of obesity before doing anything else for their health. It’s a reassuring fantasy, but not very accurate.
This seems in contrast to the recent statements by trans-specialists Drs. Marci Bowers and Erica Anderson. They say that current standards of treatment are often reckless and poorly informed.
Well, the question is which version is more representative? Are doctors recklessly prescribing puberty blockers based on a ten minute chat or are they resisting giving them out until their hand is forced? The answer is probably both, but then we should acknowledge that.
To briefly summarize, transgender people are less susceptible to certain optical illusions and are more likely to have dissociative conditions. It suggests to me that there is something deeper going on, and that it's almost certainly not as simple as there being some hidden sex determinant we just don't know yet. Right now the best treatment seems to be gender-affirming surgery, but we should be open to the possibility that this may not always be the best standard of care (and perhaps even welcome it, as surgery is never without risk or complications).
Making permanent medical changes to a person's body to conform it to a culturally created gender identity does, in very perverse way, assume, essentialize, reify, reconfirm, etc, the very culturally constructed gender identities it is trying to challenge. As you say, it kind of gets the order of priority wrong - a quick bandaid fix because it's easier to have a medical procedure on yourself than change society. So it can be a little incoherent and certainly something that should only be done on consenting adults.
But aside from likely agreeing on the need to protect children from being influenced to make permanent changes to their body to conform to cultural gender identities, I couldn't disagree more with your statement that "The urban fad for gender fluidity is dangerous".
Allowing individuals to define themselves, rather than be limited by "ancient" or essentialized cultural constructs like race or gender identity is a huge advance in human freedom. We should celebrate it, even if some of the activists do go over the top or miss the mark in some ways.
This is one of the difficulties in this debate – it scrambles alliances such that people of basic decency on either side who agree that an effeminate boy is doing nothing wrong and should be allowed to be himself and pursue whatever interests he likes, end up making common cause with the authoritarian sexists who believe the opposite. I really, really think that's a more fundamental ideological gulf than the distance between "some kids really do benefit from medical gender transition" (my view, fwiw) and "maybe they should wait until they turn 18".
Yes, one analogy is whether a parent who is simply narrowly looking out for their own child's way in the world should encourage the kid to watch their weight - because however unjust you believe it is, it is reality that thinner people have an advantage in our society.
Having a bmi between 20 and 25 isn’t only aesthetic and isn’t just a social construct. the human heart (and other organs) are not well adapted to carrying around huge amounts of fat, nor are arteries well adapted to fatty foods.
there is a range of healthy foods. this is a category imposed by nature, much lie gender. better to harmonize with nature than drive a scooter in stores, take opiates for back pain and count of angioplasty to clean your arteries
I’m sorry, this is ridiculous. The “natural” state of a human in nature is to be on the edge of starvation for your entire existence. To die before you to turn five. If you are a woman, to be pregnant pretty much your entire adult life, assuming you are getting enough food to carry a pregnancy.
Going for a jog is unnatural. Counting calories is unnatural. Heck, soap is unnatural.
This has been a really contentious sub-chapter of the debate recently - whether puberty blockers are totally reversible or have long term effects. From where I sit, it looks like this is an open debate between MDs themselves, so I have no idea who’s right.
One of the confounders is that the criteria for getting puberty blockers are so strict that there are very few cases where people did not go on to taking hormones in adulthood (because the screening has only included those very certain of their transgenderness).
So the sample size of people who reversed is small and unrepresentative of those who would reverse if puberty blockers were widely available for teens and tweens who are uncertain.
The result is that your sample of reversers tends to include a lot of trans people who were driven to abandon transition because of transphobia, and that's obviously not going to be a sample with good outcomes.
Also, some claim that the effects are not reversible because they count "going onto hormones later on" as an effect of taking puberty blockers, which I tend to regard as being a sign that people are being transphobic and dishonest.
I have a friend who takes lithium, which has known long-term negative health effects, for his bipolar disorder. But it's better to have liver issues when you're 60 than to end up committing suicide in your 20s in a depressive fit.
otoh, a reasonable person might be loathe to marry a person who cross dresses often because it might suggest a bigger risk of wanting or needing to transition.
Most reasonable people might be loathe to marry a cross dresser because it likely increases the chances that they have other psychological oddities that might complicate life and marriage. It is, nonetheless, pretty harmless(and sometimes amusing).
Yes, the core of the issue is we are talking about doing surgeries on and injecting children with hormones in a way that permanently harms them.
The other issue is that we aren't allowed to have research on the long term effects, whether physical (cancer) or psychological, because those scientists would be canceled.
I don't think much of anyone is talking about that. As a matter of course it's not generally accepted by the medical profession to give kids hormone replacement or gender reassignment surgery. I'm not sure if this happens with minors, but my understanding is that it's extremely uncommon if it does. For kids with gender dysphoria, the standard treatment is counseling to have them explore their gender identity and sometimes puberty blockers. We don't know the full long-term effects of blockers, but it's generally believed to have much less drastic long term effects after stopping compared to say surgery or hormone replacement therapy.
The idea that we cannot research something because scientists would be canceled is patently absurd. It is absurd both because whether they would be canceled is unfalsifiable and because if nobody ever did anything that might get them canceled, the word would not even exist.
Gender is an ancient category, but not one sanctified by nature. Gender is a social construct.
Different societies recognize different numbers and types of gender. Among those societies that only recognize two genders, masculine and feminine, the set of behaviors and expectations associated with each gender varies from society to society. Sex is expressed, biologically, through sex chromosomes, sex hormones, and the development of genitals. Sex is a natural phenomenon; gender is cultural.
Not to single out MY, but this article represents a double standard that really frustrates me. Dave Chappelle does a few Netflix specials with transgressive jokes because, you know, he's a comedian. So MY writes up a thoughtful article that digs up a bunch of statistics about black Americans and more-or-less concludes that progressives have to tolerate their regressive views because Democrats need their vote. And *Chappelle* is the bigot!?
If you watch Sticks and Stones and The Closer back-to-back and do not find anything Chappelle said to be directly offensive towards a group to which you belong or identify with, then you are either not American or not human.
The thing is, many people find Chappelle very, very funny (I watched Closer on an airplane and literally could not help laughing out loud). Humorless progressive scolds—exactly like the activist Christians in the 90's—are jealous of people with a sense of humor. So they get their underwear all in a knot and label Chappelle an offensive bigot because... actually I'm not really sure, because mostly they just assert that he is transphobic and the Closer proves it... somehow... and if I can't see why that is, well, then I'm transphobic too.
Lefty scolds go out of their way to be offended in the same way righty whackos seek out things to get outraged over. I guess they like the attention their rants on social media get them?
I grew up poor, rural and white, only we were all addicted to meth back then because heroin was too scarce and expensive. I lost friends to meth. I have younger family members who ruined their lives with heroin. But in Sticks and Stones Chappelle does a whole bit on the difference between poor whites on heroin and poor whites on meth. The joke was all about how to load your shotgun properly with bird shot and buck shot so you can shoot them when they break in to your house. *And I laughed my ass off.*
I think there should be a protected space for comedians who should be given wide latitude to say anything they damn well please. There's just one rule: be funny.
As a Jew, I'm thinking about how this would work for the Holocaust as a subject. Well, it has to be funny. Tough challenge! But I admire a comedian who could bring it off (see: Mel Brooks and "Springtime for Hitler"). Mind you, I can imagine some neo-Nazi comedian telling blatantly anti-Semitic Holocaust jokes to a right-wing audience and have *them* finding the jokes hilarious but that's such a fringe case it wouldn't be worth our time and attention.
The substantive objections to Chappelle from the LGBTQ comedians on Gustavo Ariano's podcast is that Chappelle used his platform to say some things that weren't true and to promulgate outdated stereotypes and myths. But the reason he has that platform is because he is funny and part of the reason he is funny is because a lot of people believe those stereotypes and untruths. In other words, if he got up there and made a bunch of politically correct in-jokes, he wouldn't be funny.
Honestly, I did not quite get what the trans comedienne was getting at because I remembered the joke she referenced differently, but it was something to the effect that she had never seen a trans person with 'their junk hanging out of their skirt at a comedy club.' But the three (L, G and T) were in agreement that some of what he said was not correct and that he should be more careful. They also acknowledged that not all jokes hit with all audiences.
One thing that they all said was that he was really funny and that they laughed at jokes even though they did not like the substance of them. There was also some disagreement between the black comedienne and the white trans comedienne about the, uhm, intersectionality jokes I guess you'd call them?
It was a good conversation overall, much better than the boilerplate "this is just further evidence the Dave Chappelle is a transphobe" quips that drove me to watch the special in the first place.
"If you watch Sticks and Stones and The Closer back-to-back and do not find anything Chappelle said to be directly offensive towards a group to which you belong or identify with, then you are either not American or not human."
This is an interesting phrasing, because there is a sizable difference between "offensive to a group which you identify with" and "offensive to *you*". I am not in the habit of trying to determine how group gestalts would feel about things and bending my reactions to mirror them; I understand that that might be useful for a political strategist, but it strikes me as useless at best to do the same for a comedy routine. All I can say is that I did not find anything offensive to *me*.
Even if something is offensive to me, I don't feel the need to demand it be cancelled. I mean, if Chapelle were demanding the Supreme Court roll back gay marriage on a Sunday political show, I might choose not to patronize him, but to get vocal about something he does as entertainment is just dumb.
I suspect most younger people who might find him offensive just think of Dave Chapelle as some old comedian from the 2000s. When I was a kid in the eighties I was much more willing to watch a special featuring 23 year old Eddie Murphy than 60 year old Don Rickles. Eddie Murphy said some arguably homophobic stuff back then but I still came to support gay marriage.
The reason I phrased it that way is because I fully respect the right on an individual to have their own beliefs and opinions and to find things funny or offensive. What irks me is the whole performative, being offended on behalf of others thing. For example, the whole "I'm vaccinated, but I totally understand <stupid reason for refusing to get vaccinated/>" routine.
I think we're agreeing on the substance? My point is that something like "this is offensive to poor whites" can only be meaningful as saying "many poor whites will find this offensive" instead of "the group of people 'poor whites' finds this offensive". The first is a statistical claim while the latter is a category error - emotions are felt by individuals, not abstract groups, and trying to download the feelings of an approximation of a group identity is a bad idea in general.
Oh, yah, I thought we were agreeing with each other. My view is that, if your metric is "a group of people finds this offensive" then you don't understand humor. Every joke in those specials invoked stereotypical traits of some group of people and it is that transgression that makes you laugh.
People are totally free to be personally offended or to find a joke unfunny. That's indeed a personal and emotional thing. But it strikes me that the scolds are arguing that a joke can be empirically not funny to an entire group of people and I find that ridiculous... which is what I think you are saying too.
I feel like people on Both Sides refuse to account for personal taste. People who are offended insist that Chappelle is objectively not funny, and people who like him seem to take some pride in their thicker skins. It’s okay to find Chappelle deeply offensive and not funny. Not everyone has to like the same things.
This is a particularly funny instance where the activist meme "listen to black voices" very clearly means "listen to this particular highly educated black person who has the same exact political opinions as me."
Seriously though, everyone mad at Chappelle on twitter has unironically used the phrase "listen to black voices" at some point and here Chappelle is making comments that are likely to the left of the median black voter! And those views are being condemned as unacceptably bigoted. So bigoted that people are *quitting* their jobs in protest. Just hilarious to me
In recent years the mainstream news media has become swamped with advocacy journalism, the evil product of an educated class that knows who Foucault is but thinks teaching evolutionary biology is a capitalist plot. Laughing an hour with Dave Chapelle helps me feel better about the extra money that I have to pay to the Yglesiases of this world, in order to get commentary and journalism that lives up to the name.
"but thinks teaching evolutionary biology is a capitalist plot."
Is this a real problem? I know that there's some really wacky progressive creationists out there but I'm pretty sure that's a very, very small fraction of the group you're talking about.
I'm wondering if he meant to write "evolutionary psychology," because there's certainly a heavy degree of attack on that. (Can also find left-wing criticisms of evolutionary biology more broadly, but those are still pretty fringe as far as I can tell, and I'm not sure they are actually becoming more common.)
Somewhat often on the ol' internet, I see progressive activists somewhat lamenting (jn a roundabout way, of course, though not always) that Democrats should be more stubborn and hard-nosed, like the Republicans tend to be...reflecting that old saw that "Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall apart." Sometimes it is mostly whining, but other times the person in trying to be more prescriptive. I think I read Tom Nichols tell one of them, in response to why Democrats can't afford to alienate the parts of their party they don't like, "...because you're a coalition, not a cult."
I think that's a really hard truth to absorb if you are a progressive activist advocating for policies you think are (and may, in fact, be!) morally correct. You look across the aisle, and you see the most vocal nutjobs getting cowtowed to party leadership, and you think to yourself, 'Why can't WE be those nutjobs?!?" while ignoring the hard reality that the people in your coalition put off by your policies ALWAYS vote, and the ones who really like what you have on offer...just...kind of don't? At least not at levels that would allow you to sustain the loss of the voters you don't like.
I don't think the issue is that activists don't vote....they definitely do. I think the issue is that non-activist young people, who might be a large portion of the people supportive of fringe-ier issues, don't show up to vote often enough.
>>But you have to also appreciate that "progressive activists vote and participate FAR more fervently than you, an internet commenter, do, and can't understand why you keep accusing them of not voting".<<
I don't know if this is being addressed at other Matt or myself, but it would be literally impossible to vote more often than I have since about 2008. I vote in every single election, normal year, off-year, etc., from federal contests all the way down to dogcatcher.
(Dogcatcher is not an office where I live, but you get the idea.)
You write: "I don’t think trying to arm-twist people into shunning everyone who expresses a widely-held viewpoint that trans activists disagree with is going to accomplish anything useful."
Au Contraire! This substack is useful. Having a place where you are able to write freely and persuasively (sometimes!) about a wide range of topics without being subjected to the Vox echo chamber and surrounded by people who feel "unsafe" if you sign a letter supporting free speech is a very useful thing.
Sitting next to Mr. Yglesias in an office would certainly make me feel unsafe. His prolific output would make me look shiftless by comparison, and I’d worry about losing my job.
We're watching 30 Rock on Netflix. It's annoying that I need to go to the library for the DVDs so we can see the 3 missing episodes. It's even more annoying that they misnumber many episodes so you can't even tell that they've deleted those episodes.
This captures my dilemma. I thought those episodes were pretty funny and on point. At the same time, I think the same of most 30 Rock episodes, so does it really matter if we lost three? I don’t know.
BLUF: Matt is wrong on the Military and Transgender people
First: I haven’t seen the closer, so I can’t comment on Chappell directly. But, I can say as a moderate that the Trans-lobby influence on politics seems to have an outsized influence on discourse.
It has gotten to the point where if I see anything about LQTBTXYX, I assume it’s not really about gay rights, but more directed at Transgender issues. Gays have largely won. Even on the conservative side, being gay doesn’t even raise eyebrows anymore. I work among a pretty right wing conservative group of blue collar workers, and gay marriage or gay jokes just aren’t really a big issue anymore.
Now, to my main point, and one that constantly annoys me.
The reason Transgender people should nott serve in the military is medical. It’s not cultural. It’s social.
People who have transitioned have to be on permanent hormones and hormone suppressors. Their hormone levels must be maintained and tested. Any other condition that requires this level of medical care automatically disqualifies you from Military Service.
If you are diabetic and must take insulin, you are disqualified. If you must take any sort of medication for depression you are disqualified. Even if all you take is medication for ADHD, you are disqualified. Blood pressure medicine, you are disqualified. Asthma, nope. The list is endless.
People argue that allowing Transgender people to serve is about increasing the pool of recruits, but this is obviously bull-pucky. If this was really the goal people cared about there are half a dozen other vastly more common exclusions that effect 1000s more people that could be debated.
The Transgender in the military issue is pure optics. It’s so that activists can say they won, feel good about themselves, and then every few months read an article about how Jane, formerly Jim, is the first Transgender airborne truck driver in the Army.
I am not saying that Transgender people can’t successfully serve and contribute in the military. What I am saying is that there is a double standard that is driven entirely by wanting to “make a point”.
I served in the USAF for 22 years. Before that I was in the Army Reserve. I think that the people in the military are the most diverse and dedicated and professional people in our country. I resent the Military being used as token organization that carves out exceptions to make cultural and social points. It causes disruption and resentment in the military, when really people should be concentrating on war fighting.
If there is a review of military enlistment standards that holistically reviewed all medical issues and what maximizes Military strength, then I would have no problem with Transgender people serving.
Ok, that’s my rant.
Now on to my solutions to all other issues.
Let’s reserve the words female and male for Gender. And then come up with other words that refer to biology.
Then what we need is a word to refer to people with wombs. I say this because some people have vaginas, but don’t have wombs or the other organs that are involved in reproduction.
This word for people with wombs should be non-gender specific, only referring to when we are talking about people who menstruate or get pregnant or require birth control.
Maybe something with the world womb in it, or at least part of it… I was thinking Wom… ite, wom… at, wom em, wom… en. That’s it. We can call people with wombs, women. Though you could be a male woman or a female woman or a non-binary woman.
Its ironic that once precise words become associated with gender, they lose their precision.
If we literally created a word… let’s say “xanin” (I don’t think that’s a real word) to refer to people with wombs in a non-gendered way, because vast majority of people with wombs are female, eventually the word would become synonymous with female/women and become gendered anyway.
Honestly unless we can talk about biological differences and gender separately, we are doomed to have the same endlessly repeating arguments.
I do have a solution for the bathroom issue. We should have a sit-down room and a stand-up room. If you can do your business while on your feet, this room has nothing but urinals. If you need to site down… then go to this room. (Though lets face it… many women wouldn’t be happy sitting one stall over from me if I had to take a dump)
Yes, I know this whole post could be taken as me not being as moderate as I am. It’s the one small issue that just gets so much more attention than it deserves as far as its applicability to most people’s daily lives.
Healthcare, housing, racism, education. Those are the issues I care about.
The problem with words for people with particular biologies is that you need more than two for medical reasons. Trans women have breasts (in spite of what a lot of people believe, they don't need implants) so they need breast cancer screenings, so they'd be with cis women for that. But they have prostates, so they need prostate cancer screenings with cis men. And they don't have cervices, so they don't need cervical cancer screenings.
Even with the uterus, it's more complicated. Trans men have a uterus but they don't menstruate. So your "people with uteruses" and "people who menstruate" categories are not the same group of people.
This is why people keep wanting to use lots of different specific categories - "people with prostates", "people with uteruses", "people with breasts", etc - for medical purposes. Because if you have a standard list for (cis) men and one for (cis) women, then trans people generally have some from column A and some from column B. So you need to specify which one you care about.
And it doesn't hurt to do the same for cis women anyway - plenty of cis women don't menstruate. If doctors have to contact everyone that menstruates because we discover some new medical risk that relates to menstruation and we need to test people, then you don't want to be bringing in everyone who has undergone menopause. You don't need to do breast cancer screenings on women who have had mastectomies.
In a medical context, fine. But one of the stupid things that our current activist class seems to have borrowed from Trotskyists is to try to normalize or require the use of academic language in everyday discourse.
This is as stupid here as it is on the topics of race and privilege.
Leave people alone, so long as they’re not advocating for lynching or harming trans folk.
No one proposes replacing "woman" with "person with a uterus" in any context other than gynaecology. I do not know what you are opposing.
A tampon is a medical device and should have an appropriate medical label, eg "for people who menstruate", or "for women and other people who menstruate".
Outside of that, not only do trans activists not want to abandon the word, they want you to use it. They want you to call trans women "women". Ideally without referencing them being trans at all - you should only refer to a trans woman as a trans woman if you would refer to a cis woman as a cis woman in the same context.
You can just talk about Laverne Cox or Nicole Maines or whoever as a "woman".
"No one proposes replacing "woman" with "person with a uterus" in any context other than gynaecology."
That is manifestly untrue.
I'm not about to troll Twitter and other fora to find every instance of it not being true, but the ACLU butchering a Ginsburg quote recently should be enough on its own to prove the point.
This phenomenon is an increasingly high-profile bit of stupidity that has infiltrated the lay world and is generating considerable pushback.
But they are proposing "pregnant people" and "birthing people" in general contexts. I don't if this is a distinction without a difference in how you're thinking about it (e.g., pregnancy is a gynaecology context). But the activist positions seem very broad to me.
Only in the contexts where you are talking about pregnant people generally. In contexts where you are talking about specific people, you can call them pregnant women (or occasionally pregnant men).
So ... we're deep down a pedantic well but I just don't follow this distinction either. In a specific case there's no need for a general statement - you would just use their name. As I read it -- it's a very broad activist view with a broader set of use-cases; it's a commitment to use gender-neutral language.
So all other things being equal, I would like a primary care physician who has some life experience with menstruation -- but if I were to ask a physician who uses she/her pronouns if she has such experience I think it would be seen as transphobic, even though I would be perfectly comfortable with a trans man as a Dr. provided that he wasn't on blockers before puberty. And if you are going to class every conversation about parenting, pregnancy and breast feeding as "gynecology" I think you are wiping out a lot of the identity and experience of many women. And I do think it's more complicated. We think about being a mother differently from being a father. In California legislation was enacted to allow trans people to change their children's birth certificates to reflect their current gender identity and the law does not require notice to the other parent, so a person identified as the father on a birth certificate could get that reissued to become the mother of that child. I think that is the kind of change that people feel should at least be open to discussion -- I admit that I would be annoyed to have to share the identity of mother of my children with my husband because it just feels inaccurate and doesn't reflect the reality of what it means to be a biological mother. I realize that there are lots of ways to be a mother, but I simply raise this example to say that I am person who believes in trans civil rights, and has a trans child, and puts my pronouns in my signature line etc. etc. but I don't want to just be a parent -- being a mother is pretty central to me, and I am not sure that someone who transitions well into their child's upbringing should be able to appropriate that term retroactively. And I realize that there is another case to be made, but I don't think that what I am suggesting comes from hate or fear.
I think there's a lot to that argument, yes; and I wasn't intending all of parenting to be "gynaecology".
There are a lot of complications here - like the difference between a retrospective change and a prospective one. If a trans woman and her cis wife have a child together, then calling them both "mother" is different from retrospectively making a trans woman a "mother" when she was "father" at birth. But also, continuing to call her "father" is constantly outing her as trans, which also seems wrong. Also, I have a really close friend who transitioned when her children were 8-13 and she is very definitely "mum" to them. But she's divorced and they grew up with her and not her birth mother (they're all adults now and have their own households), so uh, I'm not sure what point I was headed for other than that it definitely feels right for her to be a mother.
A final thought: the group that most anti-trans people are most concerned about are trans women, and yet the language changes that get argued about are almost never about trans women. They're usually about trans men, and sometimes they aren't about trans people at all.
For instance, "birthing parent" was suggested not as an alternative to "mother", but in a document making suggestions about maternity services for lesbian couples. It was saying that sometimes you (the healthcare provider) need to distinguish between the one who will give birth and the one that won't, and that using "mother" just for the one that will give birth was not how most lesbians want it to work. So they suggested to distinguish them with either "birthing parent" or "birthing mother", and observationally said that "birthing mother" would occasionally get a really angry response, while "birthing parent" rarely did, so the suggestion was to start with "birthing parent" and then switch to the family's preferred term if they made one clear.
In that context it seems fine, and the only people talking about any other context were the transphobes who were pulling a five-alarm fire about saying "birthing parent" instead of "mother" as if that was a trans proposal to use at all times.
Just want to agree that there may be many situations in which a trans woman is seen by her children and the other parent as a mother. I was simply pointing out that there was no room in the proposed legislation for the other parent to even weigh in, and I think that's what concerns me in these discussions is that they are often presented not as conflicting rights but simple black and white issues. I think that we should be able to concede that there are some hard questions around trans rights in a small number of areas (sports, prisons, sex segregated spaces where strangers are naked) and that trying to weigh the various claims case-by-case is not denying anyone's existence (that phrase seems to get thrown around a lot) but rather acknowledging that separating gender identity from sex means that when we then want to try sort based on the traditional binary categories it's not totally clear who should be sorted where in every situation. For example, as the mother of a trans son, I would be horrified if he were to be incarcerated in a facility for men, even as I as far less troubled by housing trans women in facilities for women.
You actually make a strong point. It makes a lot more sense now.
I don't know if you convinced me totally, since it comes down to such tiny slivers of the population that the effort involved to fight the battle might not be worth it, but honestly I am going to think harder about the debates and the specific context.
“Health care, housing, racism, education.” Add an energy component (incentives to move away from fossil fuels) and I’ll sign up as an active member of that party.
As always, I really appreciate the view from someone who has served in the military. Your point on its use as a “token organization” is well taken. This is one of the things I hate about activist-driven discourse: people have no self- awareness about what they don’t know.
My preferred bathroom solution: one for people who care about it being clean, another for those who don’t.
Lol... being clean and not being clean is the natural result of my proposal. Have you ever looked at the floor under the urinal.... eww.... I'm using the sit down room.
I think you’ve flipped the most likely word combinations; female for biology snd woman for gender would be more in line with popular parlance.
Also, are you sure about the ADHD thing? I have an old high school buddy who has (diagnosed, medicated as far as I know) ADHD and left the Marines after 8 years as a captain.
You can't be on ADHD medication for two years prior to enlisting. There are exceptions, but they require waivers. Most recruiters just tell people to lie about it... which you friend probably did.
Once in the military, you just get re-diagnosed, and you are then good.
Some conditions exclude you from joining, but once in don't necessarily exclude you from continuing to serve. This of people who have lost limbs. If you have no leg, you can't joint, but their are plenty of people who continue to serve after losing a limb.
Others automatically result in separation. For instance manic depressive disorders.
I agree with the word combinations, but the "womb" thing was too good to pass up. It was more a joke to illustrate my point about how language is the whole issue.
"You can't be on ADHD medication for two years prior to enlisting. There are exceptions, but they require waivers. Most recruiters just tell people to lie about it... which you friend probably did.
Once in the military, you just get re-diagnosed, and you are then good."
If this is the state of practice, then we shouldn't really be complaining that transgender medical support is an exception, we should be changing the formal rules regarding recruiting for all sorts of medical conditions.
ADHD medication and access to it is no where as critical medically as transgender medical support. You have a supply of whatever, you take it, no need for blood tests or adjustment (assuming most cases).
The same isn't true of Transgender medical issues.
But, that is my whole point. I am complaining because it specifically is an exception, and they didn't adjust standards for all sorts of things.
ADHD isn't the best comparison though.
Diabetes is. If you develop diabetes which requires insulin, you are discharged... that's it.
Their are no waivers for diabetes at all.
Medical exclusions for the military are based simply on the concept that all military members should be deployable to austere remote locations for long periods of time to perform war fighting activities without any breaks and during long periods of time without access to anything other than first aid level medical care.
I would regard it as completely sensible to permit both diabetics and transgendered personnel in non-combat, non-hardship postings.
Nothing prevents these folks from having desperately needed skills to contribute, nor from feeling the same loyalty and call to serve that their combat branch counterparts do.
But you're right that there are very, very good reasons to avoid posting them in places or situations where medical support is impossible.
Hell, I doubt that the Rangers or any branch's SF would consider someone who takes medication daily. Let alone someone who needs additional support, such as bloodwork or regular physical checkups.
This is where civilians don't understand the military.
What you are advocating is a two tiered system.
Should they get the same pay? Have the same benefits, even though one group of people have more risk?
What you don't understand is the combat deployments happen on a rotation basis. You do your rotation based on the understanding that your coworker at your base will do the next rotation. What if your coworker is transgender? You now have to do all the rotations?
Besides, we have people who provide and contribute skills to the military who don't deploy. They are called DoD civilians. They work side by side with us at the the home base. Their purpose is provide continuity and support when the uniformed members do deploy.
And there are no desperately needed skills the military needs to recruit. The military does not recruit anyone based on skills, they train people to do things the military way. If I was a world class mechanic and joined the military to be a mechanic, I would still be taught how to be a mechanic.
When you see things about desperately needed skills and the military it is always about retention of people already in the military. Skills that were provided by the military.
Note: There is an argument that the Navy could do what you advocate, since except for a few specialized occupations, their isn't an expectation of deployment except to large ships like the other services. Not a strong argument, but they are the most likely to have something like that.
This relates to an issue I have with trans rights activists. They seem to set the bar waaaay too high. They don't just want you to accept them as people, and grant them all the rights anyone else has, they want you to accept their epistemology.
My recollection with the fight for gay rights, and gay marriage in particular, was that they were looking for tolerance and equal rights. It was ok if you believed that marriage was between a man and a women, so long as you didn't stand in the way of the US recognizing gay marriages or same sex couples getting married. You didn't have to be personally OK with same sex relationships, so long as you treated everyone equally. This was important because you have a lot of people, e.g. Catholics, where these things are literally against their religion, but who are OK living in a pluralistic world.
The same is pretty clearly not true for trans activists. You can support every aspect of the Trans Right movement, anti-discrimination laws, pronouns, military, bathrooms, sports teams, etc.. You can even personally believe that it is fine to be trans. But if you don't buy into the epistemology, i.e. that TWAW, you are called a bigot and told that you want trans people dead.
This is particularly rough because you don't chose your beliefs. You can be more or less open to arguments on an issue, but, if you haven't been convinced of something, you haven't been convinced. To make your having been convinced (or at least being willing to lie about your beliefs), rather than your willingness to live and let live, as a ticket to polite society, seems out of step with what it means to live in a liberal democracy.
We live in a pluralistic society. People's beliefs are going to differ. I have friends who are Christians, who I respect as people despite not agreeing with them that they have an immortal soul. I have friends who are Scientologists who I respect as people despite not agreeing that they are full of thetan. I don't need to agree with someone on their gender to respect them and believe they should be able to live their best life.
I think this is why the weird debate on the left about these issues is so unsettling because their seems to be a persistent effort to just hand wave away the extent to which their is an ideology at play that many people simply do not understand. So sure, trans women are women, but is a trans woman a woman in exactly the same way as I am? I don't quite know how to make sense of that because I don't have any gender identity distinct from my biology -- I know I am a woman because I have a uterus and female endocrine system etc. but I am a misanthrope and I don't feel I have that much in common with other women or other men. So when a comedian points out that most of us don't really believe that trans women are women in exactly the same way as other women the left media in a well intentioned effort to support trans people who clearly have a pretty large cross to bear acts as if that is some fringe view. Their was an NYMag story about Netflix and the controversy recently that described Chappelle as "obsessed" with trans people because it seems necessary to treat people who are probing the many challenging implications of divorcing sex and gender identity as freaky when it's actually pretty normal to want to understand why exactly we would jump on board such a radical cultural change without understanding the consequences. And that kind of gaslighting really does make it more likely that people don't trust the media because they are telling them things that are plainly untrue or pretty misleading (e.g. trans women have no advantage in sports).
This mirrors my feeling on this. I think biological sex can predict things about you (including bother body parts and personality), but I don't understand how falling outside the norm of those predictions means that you are not your biological sex. If I role a D20 10 times, it is possible that all the rolls come in under 6, but that wouldn't mean that I was rolling a D6.
I also think there’s been a shift in how we talk about inclusivity, where anything that applies to a vast majority but not to a tiny minority is considered to be non-inclusive and therefore harmful. On Twitter Jesse Singal shared an email from a rich Boston suburban school district that said (paraphrasing), we know a lot of kids love wearing their Halloween costumes to school, but there are also kids who don’t like it or can’t afford costumes, so since we’re an inclusive school we’re not letting kids wear costumes to school this year. I don’t know what the school’s angle was—maybe they just didn’t want costumes and were using “inclusivity” as a cover story—but the point is that that kind of reasoning gets treated as normal instead of bizarre. It seems clear to me that we’ll never live in a world where we as a society don’t describe women giving birth as the default or say “is it a boy or a girl?” or expect people to assume that Margaret with long hair is a woman, and it also seems clear to me that if I’m right that’s nevertheless compatible with political equality for trans and NB people, so we should fight on the ground we can actually win.
Yes, excellent point in your first sentence. Also relates to the insistence in some channels on using "Latinx" because it's purportedly "inclusive," even though it's overwhelmingly not used (if not affirmatively rejected) by the Hispanic/Latino community itself.
Yes, exactly. And to be clear, if someone prefers to be called “they” or “Latinx” I think it’s just common courtesy to accommodate them. It’s treating those as the default, where some people argue that we should not assign gender to newborn babies or where an academic job title is now certain to be “professor of Latinx studies,” that not only seems overconfident about where this is going, but also seems to violate other progressive commitments (for instance that we should call marginalized populations by the terms they prefer).
I guess you could charitably say that it doesn't violate any commitments because for these particular progressives, their commitment is not really "call marginalized populations by the terms they prefer" but "in any dispute between two different populations the *more* marginalized population's views must win."
FWIW, "side with the more marginalized population," isn't the worst rule of thumb.
It's a horrible rule of thumb that produces unending moving goalposts as folks tie themselves into knots trying to establish who's more marginalized.
Is it the gay Asian kid kicked out of home at 17 who gets into an Ivy League school but can barely survive to graduate, or the Hispanic immigrant who builds a successful business and raises a family before she gets detained by ICE and booted across the border even though she's a legal resident?
Is it the poor white family who can't afford to control their child's diabetes, or the middle-class black one who've been pulled over and treated horribly by police?
Is it the working-class black family who get priced out of their apartment in a newly desirable neighborhood downtown, or the white lesbian couple who outbid them so they can live in a more accepting community?
"Solidarity," a universal understanding of our shared humanity and a mutual obligation to reach best-faith consensus and make policy and decisions on that basis, is the only answer to these problems.
Not some mush-minded idiocy about who's worse off.
Depends on why they are marginalized. If we get to the point where we are siding with Nazis because they are the most marginalized...
OTOH it’s the invitation to the Oppression Olympics medal ceremony.
Sure, but how can an entire population have views? People's views are ultimately individual and not a reliable guide to the opinions of their entire demographic. Anyway, this principle gets abandoned in the case of average differences in viewpoints between, e.g., college-educated Black Americans and working-class Black Americans about the police, or Latino US citizens with grad degrees and recent Mexican immigrant farmworkers with limited English about how to refer to people of Latin American descent. Who's "more marginalized" is pretty clear there, and in which direction their opinions differ is also pretty clear.
I forgot where I heard this, but someone said that when you hear the word "inclusive" that actually means "censored". The reasoning was that, to feel included you must not feel offended, so an inclusive group avoids words and actions that might be offensive. I think the kind of "inclusivity" you cite here fits that description.
Not just harmful, but violent! The posing has grown remarkably silly.
A huge amount of the wokeist project can be summed up with "profoundly illiberal."
I feel like the big difference between the gay rights movement and the trans rights movement is that the gay rights movement had a big legislative goal (gay marriage) while the trans rights movement kind of doesn't, or if it does it's on the defensive ends of them (shooting down bathroom bills, etc.). So a lot of trans activism has less to do with electoral politics in general than with sort of aggressive etiquette policing.
I think viewing the gay rights movement as being about a legislative goal focuses too much on recent goals of the movement, which to some extent were built upon more fundamental work: reframing homosexuality as a civil rights movement (it's bad to discriminate against people due to their sexual preference, it's bad that people commit violence against gay people for being gay), dismantling a previously strongly held view (sexual preference is a choice and that choice can be pathological or immoral).
We've come so far in that direction that the "before times" are almost unimaginable now. In the 80s I read a serious op-ed in Newsweek (cuz that was a thing) from someone who wanted the gay community to go _pick a different term_ so that he could have the word "gay" back without connotations of homosexuality.
I bring up this (very dumb) example because the big framing change was going from "the problem is with the gay community, they need to change their behavior" to "the problem is with society, they need to stop discriminating." I view that shift as a huge civil rights victory.
MY has commented about this in the past in his column about the Overton window (which may be paywalled) - the idea is that if your views aren't widely accepted, the task at hand is persuasion.
I depends on how far back you go. When I was a kid, gay rights was really focused on the AIDS epidemic because the public mostly wrote it off as a gay pandemic and/or god punishing them for their sins; it was a problem for *those people*. My recollection was that the gay marriage stuff didn't really become a touchstone until the mid-to-late 90's because by then activism around AIDS had brought so many people out of the closet that it became untenable to blame *those people* since they were actually your friends and family. So the opposition pivoted to "protecting families" and came up with a whole line of bullshit about how marriage is only for procreation. And the mainstream backlash to that stupidity is what focused the public discourse on marriage.
Seems to me that trans rights activism is following that pattern, by expressive anger at feeling othered and responding to assaults on their rights one-by-one as the opposition tees up bathroom bills and laws about birth certificates. To wit, it was not that long ago that I only got two boxes to tick for "sex" on forms. Eventually the opposition hit something catastrophically stupid that galvanizes the mainstream in favor of some pro-trans policy and a new status quo will emerge. (I do not mean to diminish the hard work of activists that actually drives all of these changes!)
I think this will be different. Two gay people getting married doesn't really effect most people (except bakers and florists). But having a man in your daughters bathroom/locker room. Or competing against her in sports is something that effects a lot of people.
What about someone's trans daughter being forced to use the boy's room? Why is the only victim worth protecting the hypothetical innocent cis daughter?
If there is a man, and not a trans woman, in the women's room, what is the actual issue? It's weird and socially a faux pas, but what do you want to do about it? Should a man go to jail because he was about to shit himself and the women's room was open? Is it a problem for a father to be changing his kid's diaper in the women's room if the men's room doesn't have a changing table? It's a women's room, it's not even like there's a risk of anyone being exposed to the sight of his penis.
Now, if you're actually worried about men committing sexual assault or sexual harassment in a woman's bathroom, that's *already* a crime, and laws denying access to bathrooms to trans women isn't going to stop a cis man who wants to attack women in a bathroom because he already doesn't care what the law says.
No, I think TERFs are bigoted for digging up the corpse of the anti-gay "think about our poor boys in the restroom with the perverts" canard.
It turns out that most people are pretty normal and that people born with XY chromosomes aren't in fact sexbeasts, and are in fact capable of controlling their animal lusts within 20 feet of a toilet.
I agree that there are corner cases where policy solutions are not so clear cut.
Chappelle had a bit where he said if a women walked up to the urinal next to him, hiked up her skirt and pulled out her penis, she would seem out of place. But that if a man with a vagina dropped trow and backed up to a urinal to take a piss, he wouldn't think twice about it. That make sense to me, but as with many things, the situation with kids (e.g., youth sports) is different.
So we're going to have to work through the specific case of sports. But other than that (not insignificant) issue, it is easy to see trans rights playing out similarly to gay rights because the only reason to oppose explicit equal rights is to validate a certain segment of non-college-educated working-class whites that Republicans need to win/steal elections. Realistically, granting those rights impacts almost no one outside the trans community, just like same-sex marriage.
And yet twenty years ago, people vociferously argued that allowing same-sex couples to marry would undermine the institution for everyone. It wasn’t understood as the couple’s own business.
Yes, this is one of the things that's kind of awkward for the narrative of the supposedly impending trans genocide -- even the vast majority of "Red" states already allow people to redefine their sex on their birth certificates (only KS and TN don't according to the list here: https://www.lambdalegal.org/know-your-rights/article/trans-changing-birth-certificate-sex-designations ) and be legally recognized as their preferred sex.
I oppose both
Do you think those goals are “strident”? They seem legitimate to me, and I’d way rather be talking about that than if I need to identify as a “cervix-endowed person.”
I think everyone should be treated with respect. But that doesn't mean I have to believe your delusion. A man pretending to be a women doesn't make them a women anymore than them pretending to be a cat makes them a cat.
The way you feel doesn't change objective reality.
And my tax dollars certainly shouldn't have to cover it.
The trans philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell has likened trans women being called women to adoptive parents being called parents. Of course, no amount of legal status or emotional relationship to a child will ever erase the lack of genetic relatedness between an adoptive parent and their child – "the way you feel doesn't change objective reality" – and the situation of an adoptive family is always going to be different from a biological family in terms of establishing a relationship (or none) with biological parents, and in terms of dealing with the medical system as you may have more trouble getting information on family medical history. Plus there's the risk of not being seen in public as your child's parent if you don't look like them. These are facts inherent to adoptive parenting, even in a maximally tolerant society. But if you died on the hill of refusing to call adoptive parents "parents", you can see why people would get really upset. And I don't think most people would regard it as a brave stand for truth.
That analogy doesn't work, and it's because "parenting" is a concrete action that a person takes but "womaning" is not. If a natal male person transitions, how can we describe that person as "womaning" in any way other than just performing stereotypes? [thanks to Helen Joyce for that observation, although she said it better than I did]
What about burn victims who need cosmetic surgery, or women who want reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy? You’re still a woman, breasts or not, but a lot of women find the lack of them distressing.
If we believe in fundamental characteristics, then we agree that starts in the brain, no? There’s some neurological wiring that says, “I am a woman” or “I am a man.” Just as by and large, we have wiring saying “I will want to have sex with people of the opposite sex when I hit puberty.”
Just as we now accept that sometimes that wiring doesn’t always go as planned when it comes to sexual attraction, surely we can accept that some people have divergent wiring when it comes to sexual identification.
We don’t tell a gay man that he is objectively incorrect that he is attracted to men. Similarly, we should accept that some people are neurologically wired to feel like their gender that doesn’t match their sex. It’s not a delusion. They recognize their bodies don’t match their minds.
You frame these questions interestingly because I would agree that the wiring in the brain can lead to non standard responses. We've changed how we answer the question of which answers are viewed as acceptable and which are viewed as not.
More to the point, the discussion currently is whether people can redefine themselves as how they feel from the neurological wiring and whether they can go so far as to rewrite their bodies to match that wiring. Would it also be acceptable to redo the neurological wiring if we understood how?
They are free to feel like they are in the wrong body. But that doesn't change the reality. Or mean that I should have to subsidize their makeover.
My mind thinks I'm still a thin 20 year old. But the mirror says otherwise.
As a cis woman, I am fine with sharing a locker room with someone who has had at least some gender reassignment surgery / hormones, partly because that demonstrates a serious commitment to identifying as a woman.
As for someone who has a man’s body (penis, and probably somewhat taller & stronger than the average woman), no, I do not want to share a locker room. That feels unsafe to me. And I’m not saying a trans woman would be more violent or anything. I just think there’s a fair number of skeevy, cis, straight men who would be happy to lie and hang out with a bunch of naked ladies, and I don’t think it’s fair to ask me to potentially risk getting assaulted.
Bathrooms, I don’t care, because you’re not getting naked, nor are you going to see anyone else naked.
My understanding is that some people identify as trans, but not everyone experiences body dysmorphia. If you want hormones or surgery, yes, I think you should have a medical diagnosis. You can’t even get anti-depressants without a doctor’s consult.
I do not support teens taking hormones, even ones just delaying puberty unless they’ve been 100% proven safe.
I agree with everything you said here. Isn't this pretty much the TERF position that apparently is really offensive to some?
"You can be more or less open to arguments on an issue, but, if you haven't been convinced of something, you haven't been convinced."
I liked this sentence in particular.
Right on. I find this especially difficult because it's really hard for me to wrap my head around and accept the epistemology.
For example, I don't find it very hard to imagine being gay. It's actually seems pretty natural --- literally; it happens fairly frequently in nature. Perhaps for that reason, I don't find the idea hard to wrap my head around.
But feeling so fundamentally incompatible with the body you're born into? As much as I try, I just can't fathom it, and I speak as someone with health conditions that I'd much rather not have. And the treatments for this incompatability are decidedly unnatural. Even thinking about common surgical procedures can make me feel ill --- nevermind more invasive procedures. (I actually fainted once when someone described a pretty invasive back surgery in gory detail --- altho there were probably also other factors at play in my fainting.)
I realize that, fundamentally, this is my problem, and people should be able to live their lives as they please. But I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with all of this, and I doubt that will change. I feel guilty for feeling this way, but them's the breaks, and trying to force a philosophy on me can only backfire. Maybe someday I'll grow it, but I doubt it.
So to be completely fair, we can’t know if those animals are gay, or trans. Animals that engage in homosexual behavior often demonstrate other behaviors associated with the other sex of their species. And we can’t ask them, lol.
I've always been devoutly Catholic, and in college I had a friend who was atheist, and would just tell me he had no respect for belief in God, church, etc....we would go have a beer and talk about rock bands.
Ah, I have identified a commentator who just needs to visibly Do The Work so that they can be seen to have come to the correct conclusions. If you don't have the correct conclusions yet, you need to Do The Work more.
Okay, I'll go against the grain here.
The "Trans women are women" thing hits me as similarly blunt as "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" chant in the 2000s. People did, in fact, get used to it, and so the chant went away.
There's a difference between the gay demand to be accepted and (to switch a bit) using the case of trans men becoming pregnant to say that one must stop using the general term "pregnant women" and must say "pregnant people." It's using a very tiny edge case to define the terms that all must now conform to. While one must stand up for the rights of trans men, including to abortion, birth control, etc., I don't see the case for that situation defining our general language. If I were a woman who had fought decades for women's rights, I'd be pretty pissed. What's next -- domestic violence and rape are "people problems"?
To use another linguistic example: By the rules of Hebrew, if you're talking to an audience of a thousand women, you use the feminine form of Hebrew verbs. But if one man happens to enter the audience, by the rules of grammar, you're supposed to switch to the masculine verb forms.
Obviously there are differences here -- men, unlike trans people, have long been the dominant gender and language reflects that -- but the wild imbalance still grates.
Wait but domestic violence and rape *are* people problems that happen to people no matter their gender or birth sex and it would be really helpful if we remembered that a little more often. I'm not sure how skewed the impact is, but I'm confident it's much less skewed than pregnancy issues.
Absolutely true that men can be victims of rape (especially in prison) as well as victims of domestic violence. But it's so disproportionately a problem for women that I think we lose a lot when we try to cram the entire world into a single word or phrase.
This is just complaining about how "marriage means the union of a man and a woman" all over again.
There’s a pretty obvious difference of scale here. Tweaking one’s definition of marriage comes up very infrequently and really is just a tweak (expanding the category “married” to include same-sex couples who have undergone the same ceremony), plus i think most activists didn’t care as much about whether someone was willing to make that tweak as long as the LEGAL right was secured. Eliminating gender from our understanding of how humans and human society works is a much more pervasive change, particularly, as Marc alludes to, since feminism and progressivism have for years viewed the different experiences and treatment of women as being vital matters of attention.
"Trans women are women" is exactly the same type of tweak! It simply expands the category "women" to include some persons not assigned female at birth who sufficiently identify as women.
"Pregnant people" is not eliminating gender from our understanding. It's separating gender and biological sex, albeit in a edge case (that IMO is not a big deal either way).
Besides, gender abolition is a fringe position; its not even widely accepted in progressive circles! A lot of binary trans people ~like~ gender, as long as they can be accepted as the gender they self ID as.
Right but the category "women" is much much bigger and more fundamental to our understanding of the world than the category "marriage." "Married" is contingent; "woman" or "man" is essential for >99% of people.
No. Marriage is a social construction, literally a contract. Sex is a biological fact.
I'm not following. The marriage case is about laws and rights, not language. Am I missing your meaning?
But a lot of activism in the 2000s was Andrew Sullivan style ‘we’re here, gay marriage is fundamentally conservative, which should be very easy to get used to’
They're both slogans, but I'm not sure that they are the same ask. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it," is demanding a spot in society, but less so a spot in your epistemology.
But it’s genuinely unclear whether “get used to it” made more of a difference than, like, Will and Grace and Ellen and various other mealy-mouthed sellout assimilationist moves.
How is Will and Grace a mealy-mouthed sellout assimilationist move? No snark intended, I don't think I understand the connotations here.
I wasn’t really being sincere there, but I recall more radical gay and lesbian activists complaining about the safe, de-sexed, sanitized gays on such shows.
True, but I'm comparing blunt "in your face" slogans. There are similar trans assimilationist media equivalents like Transparent, Orange is the New Black, Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, etc.
One of these statements is true. The other is simply not, unless you redefine the word involved to make it effectively meaningless. That's the problem - activists are asking people to mouth a mantra that everyone knows is not true.
Consider that the things which people insist matter most to them do, in fact, matter most to them. Seems pretty straightforward to me that the epistemology - the social confirmation of status - is, for a non-trivial and loud portion of the trans movement, the point, beyond and above any policy intervention or material discrimination.
I'm sure that there are people for whom this matters very much. There are a lot of things that matter very much to people. I don't think that you have to just accept something because if matters very much to someone.
It is also worth noting that this is something on which you have conflicting groups caring very much about it. While I do not agree with Terf/gender critical feminists on most policy ideas, I truly believe that not expanding the definition of "woman" to include transwomen, or shrinking the definition of "women" to exclude men matters very much to them.
I recently heard an interview with two mothers, who believed that their daughters (amab) were confused and were making an error in medically transitioning that they would live to regret. I think it is likely that those mothers were mistaken, but I also believe that it mattered very much to them that their children not make what they saw as a mistake
Personally, I don't think that this matters most to me, but my problem is that I can only believe what I believe. And it upsets me when people call me a bigot and accuse me of basically wanting to commit genocide because I can't switch my beliefs, even if I am otherwise on board for the project.
I mean, accusations of being a bigot and wanting to commit genocide are rhetorical clubs, designed to rally force against enemies. with the particular language subject to change depending on the normative moral standards of the place and time. Those are going to fly wherever there's a social conflict. And yeah, the problem with this loud portion of the trans movement is that their big ask just is incommensurate with the big asks of significant other groups. Worse, even if that weren't the case, getting confirmation of success would necessarily involve some sort of obnoxiously-invasive loyalty-testing and thought-policing. So someone is gonna win, and someone is gonna lose.
Do you honestly think that gay people a few decades back didn't care if you thought they were straight? Do you understand their demand as asking you to believe that they were straight people who wanted you to respect their decision to be married to a member of the opposite sex?
It's just categorization. I don't believe anyone really cares if you think a trans woman is a woman. However, calling her a man to her face isn't much different than calling a gay man a faggot. It's rude and unnecessary. Ranting about it in a forum isn't much better. As far as what is a man and what is a woman, this long post is an excellent(and amusing) read:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
I agree that it is just a categorization, but I think it makes more sense to categorize transwomen as men and vice versa. In particular, I tend to think that strict gender roles are bad and that categorizing transwomen as women reinforces that view. I otherwise am perfectly fine with transgendered people (which is actually what rejecting gender roles would require).
I understand that transgendered people find it offensive to say this, and I would not say it to their face, particularly unprompted, in the same way that I don't generally bring up my skepticism of Scientology with my friends who are scientologists. However, when the issue comes up, I do think it is appropriate to discuss it, particularly when it is in the context of someone else being dragged for having the same disagreement. I don't think debates should be allowed to be one sided.
I will check out the link.
I listened to the slatestarcodex post and I pretty much agree with it, including the idea that there is no harm and quite a lot of benefits to allowing transgendered people present as their prefered gender.
However, I just don't think that self-ID is a good way to draw the line. I think doing so beings too much baggage with it on other gender issues that I had thought we were moving past.
For the record, I also disagree with the way they drew the line on planets. I think "cleared their neighborhood " is too subjective and we should instead say that the planet can't orbit the barycenter of any other planet, which gets Pluto and Charon on the list.
God help us all if the backlash to "leftist" culture also grows to encompass an economic consensus that's already not at all left-leaning.
IMO one of two things happens:
Either the Democrats get their own house in order by shouting down the "professional class propriety" assholes, which gets them enough votes from the culturally-conservative-but-populist folks to really cement a governing coalition and effect some change...
Or they fail, and a lot of mushy middle folks end up voting Republican, which leads in the short-term to the economic consensus shifting even further away from effective and active governance. But that will sow the seeds of its own demise, frankly, because it doesn't and can't address real problems.
Third?
Agreed. And I think also led to Trump
I look forward to reading on Twitter how another Yglesias take that seems obviously correct is actually patriarchal white supremacy
Me too
What’s with Alon Levy recently? He’s been as anti-anti-woke as Wil Wilkinson has.
Purely informative note: I think Alon prefers they/them (based on their twitter)
Thanks for the correction, and apologies to Alon!
Don’t you ever want to own the (pc) libs?
I wouldn’t even trade my Ford Pinto for one.
No, no, “toxic whiteness” is the new go-to for these issues.
Funny how no one sees an issue with attacking the immutable characteristics of a certain group of people.
As readers of MY, maybe we should start using the phrase "toxic wokeness" in public spaces. That would be part of our Doing The Work
"toxic whiteness" = bleach
Likely "toxic cis-het-ness."
The wedge issue is womens’ sports. Suburban dads want their daughters to pursue excellence. Their daughters will never be as fast or as strong as athletic boys, but the training, discipline, struggle and joy of athletic competition are just as sweet for women as men. Watching Lindsay Vonn ski fearlessly was beautiful even though she was 3% slower than the elite men.
Allowing trans athletes to compete as women shits on the struggle of girls and women for physical excellence. It subordinates the needs of the 99% to the 1% and allows the exception to deconstruct the rule. I’m all for toleration, but I would become a lot less tolerant if trans gender athletes destroy paths of female excellence.
I've seen arguments that transgender athletes aren't that big of an issue since their aren't that many transgender athletes in High School or College sports, so why complain.
This argument is short-sighted for several reasons. First, the prevalence of transgenderism (is that the correct word) has significantly increased among children, so the issue will become more prevalent in the future.
The other reason why this argument is short circuited, is because their is an arbitrary cutoff for how many people have to be effected by an issue for it to be relevant.
For instance, I am guessing that the number of men who get pregnant is lower than the number of trans-women who dominate a sport.
The sports issues is only going to become more prevalent and significant in the future.
“First, the prevalence of transgenderism (is that the correct word) has significantly increased among children”
Frankly, as the parent of a young daughter, I don’t give a damn about sports in this context.
I care about the fact that that increase in the prevalence of gender dysphoria shows every sign of being due to mass hysteria/faddishness, nothing more.
I care about the fact that the treatment modes for gender dysphoria are deeply, deeply broken, and that the medical community’s increasing consensus on that matter is criticized for political reasons.
Hopefully, by the time my daughter is older, this will have been worked out in an evidence-based manner, but I have to admit… If I were taking her to be treated for a related condition today, I would not do it in the United States.
This just seems like the fad of young women identifying as bisexual as gay marriage became more accepted. Some of them genuinely were. Some of them were just experimenting with their identity.
Much like how a straight person who claims to be bisexual for the bohemian cool points would balk at having a same-sex sexual encounter in the moment, a cisgender person claiming gender dyphoria would also probably not commit to living as a different gender. Meanwhile, growing acceptance of LGBT people is an overall good thing for the real bi/homosexuals and transgender people.
"This just seems like the fad of young women identifying as bisexual as gay marriage became more accepted. Some of them genuinely were. Some of them were just experimenting with their identity."
The difference is the push for them to start puberty blocking hormones, or surgery.
That's a huge difference than maybe drunk fooling around with someone of the same sex and then deciding it's not for you
Most underage transitioning is just social. You wear different clothes, change your hair, use different gendered rooms, and go by a different name. So in that case, it is equivalent to "drunkenly fooling around". Cis kids would start to feel gender dysphoria in those conditions and decide not to pursue it further.
You're not making irrevocable changes. You can't get surgery until you're 18. I don't even think you can start taking hormones until you're 16, unless you've been extensively cleared by psychological and medical experts and have been living as the opposite gender for several years.
Hormone blockers are already prescribed to cisgender kids for non-transitionary reasons. If a few deluded cis kids manage to convince doctors that they should spend some time on blockers and MAYBE develop health issues later in life, but it saves the lives of many more trans kids who won't go through the wrong puberty and end up depressed adults with irrevocably damaged bodies, that's a trade I think is worth making.
"You're not making irrevocable changes. You can't get surgery until you're 18. I don't even think you can start taking hormones until you're 16,"
Incorrect on both. They are allowing kids to make these life altering decisions that are often irreversible. Puberty blocking hormones can lead to sterility. And can even make it so you can never orgasm later.
These kids don't know what they are doing. And it's medical malpractice that doctors are doing it.
When I was a teen, there was an epidemic of kids cutting themselves that people blamed on 2000s era emo music and the associated aesthetic of self-harm. Some of them had genuine depression, others were doing it to get attention. That left actual permanent scars on people. However, our generation somehow managed to survive and become responsible adults. There's always been a "kids these days" problem with the media they consume.
There's strong evidence that adolescent depression and anxiety has spiked since ~2010, particularly for girls. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that body dysmorphia / physical tics/ and other mental health disorders might be increasing for the same reasons.
There is a very strong case to be made that the rise in gender dysphoria is the result of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment. Research is ongoing.
https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2014/reduced-testosterone-tied-to-endocrine-disrupting-chemical-exposure
Ehhh, "very strong" is not how that research should be characterized. It wasn't in 2014 and not much has changed since.
Meanwhile, there are well-documented cases of "mass gender dysphoria outbreaks" among young girls, and parents and professionals who push back against early medical intervention in favor of in-depth psychological evaluation and treatment are being marginalized or even attacked.
Per your long covid is just hysteria - some date:
“This paper estimates the workplace productivity effects of COVID-19 by studying performance of soccer players after an
infection. We construct a dataset that encompasses all traceable infections in the elite leagues of Germany and Italy. Relying on a staggered difference-in-differences design, we identify negative short- and longer-run performance effects. Relative to their preinfection outcomes, infected players’ performance temporarily drops by more than 6%.Over half a year later, it is still around 5% lower.”
https://www.dice.hhu.de/fileadmin/redaktion/Fakultaeten/Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche_Fakultaet/DICE/Discussion_Paper/368_Fischer_Reade_Schmal.pdf
Also... I did not say Covid is "just" hysteria.
I am on record as saying that Long Covid is an issue.
What I am saying is that hysteria is non-trivial contributor those who say they have long covid.
Same with Gender Dysphoria and Tourette's syndrome.
The only thing that is "just" hysteria is Cuba Syndrome. (most likely).
You're replying to the wrong poster.
There is also a very strong case that somatic or hysteria causes for issues are more prevalent that people would care to admit.
The same people who say their should be a stigma against mental health issues, are extremely reluctant to talk about somatic or hysteria related contributions to issues.
There is evidence that long covid, Cuba syndrome (the embassy microwave attacks), and now Tourette's are all caused by some form of hysteria.
Doctors on the QT talk about it, but it is a forbidden subject in popular discourse.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-developing-tics-doctors-say-tiktok-could-be-a-factor-11634389201
We should be agnostic as to the root cause be it mental, neurological, chemical, hormonal, social, etc. Some seem especially attracted to social causes. That’s certainly possible but there are many other causes one should be open to.
And you should also be careful with how you understand things like hysteria. There is a lot of evidence that some kinds of chronic pain are internal to the brain. Someone with chronic lower back pain is having the pain center of their brain stimulated by errant internal neural impulse traffic. Not by traffic originating in the nerves of the lower back.
But! And this is important, the neurons in the brain’s pain center are being stimulated all the same. The suffering of the afflicted is the same in both cases.
Wait a minute -- there is a crucial piece you are missing here. The treatment for pain that is organic in nature is very different from the treatment for pain that neurogenically/psychologically mediated. It's essential to recognize this and treat those differences; otherwise, you risk getting people addicted to opiates or other pain medication. You risk doing more harm than good.
Likewise - it is essential to recognize the difference between (very rare) true trans people and people who are psychologically drawn to the idea of being trans for whatever reason. Again-- the treatment is WAY different. But, from the trans community, approaching a teen who claims to be trans with anything less than full 100% acceptance, and going forward with medical treatment is is virulently anti-trans. How does this make sense? This sudden epidemic in trans teens due to chemical exposure? Bullshit.
Yes, pain being experienced is certainly real no matter the cause. I have a friend who had a leg amputated and experiences ghost pain, and other sort of weird side effects.
However I think that pain caused by neurons being mis-wired in the brain is different than hysteria... especially if their is evidence that the hysteria has significantly increased due to some sort of external social influence.
Sure, this may become more of a problem, but I just can't get too worked up by it. People who realize their transgender face a helluva lot more challenges in their lives than the females they may be competing against athletically.
I recall some runners complaining about the advantage the South African athlete Oscar Pistorious had because of his prosthetic legs. My opinion was if they were that affronted they could go ahead and get their legs amputated and enjoy the same advantage he had (well, presumably without all the murder stuff).
I agree. But I also acknowledge that if I was the parent of a transgender child, or a parent of a girl who worked hard but got beat by a transgender athlete that had an advantage I would care a lot more about it.
Its also unfair that some kids are genetically gifted with muscles or hand eye coordination or speed or height.
I'm saying it's fair because the other competitors have every right to use the same technology. The fact that they would never do it speaks volumes.
The same as in the Pistorious case: deal with it. Because *no one* would cut off his legs to make up for Pistorious's advantage; they just had to deal with it.
Lots of things in life are unfair. Some athletes are gifted with better genes. Some have access to better coaching. Some have access to better technology (whether it's the best shoes or prosthetic legs).
That said, to compete against women, a trans woman can't just say "I'm a woman." She has to undergo significant treatment that, as Richard Gadsden points out, diminishes her physical advantages. She has to live as a woman and make it core to her life, with all the trauma that entails.
And really, how big a deal is this anyway? I'd like some statistics and not just anecdotes. Though speaking of anecdotes, years ago I met Renee Richards, the tennis player who famously transitioned to female. A very nice person! Granted she was not young when finally allowed to play women's tennis, but I note that her highest ranking was 20th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Richards
There's several layers of filtering that apply to high school sports though.
How many kids are going to be comfortable being openly trans? I crunched the numbers in my high school district (a moderately wealthy, fairly large suburban school district) and even with the "epidemic" of kids today identifying as trans, my calculations said there would only be about 45 trans kids at most across the whole district.
Now how many of those kids are going to be interested in playing sports? My high school offered about a dozen sports in each season, so not only does that dilute the numbers further, but I'd wager most of those kids probably don't want to play sports instead of doing other afterschool activities.
Now how many of THOSE kids are going to be devoted enough to play sports at a top tier competitive level instead of just for fun? What are they supposed to do if they want to play a team sport?
It just seems like a total edge-case non-issue.
"How many kids are going to be comfortable being openly trans?"
The problem with this approach is that it assumes social aversion to "transness" remains unchanged when the same people who are claiming there's no risk of a significant number of trans athletes entering youth sports are simultaneously doing everything they can to both breakdown social aversions to it *and* make it easier to be categorized as trans by emphasizing self-ID with minimal (if any) outward commitment to establishing one's "transness." When you make something simultaneously less costly and easier to do, you get more of it, especially when there are rewards associated with it.
When I say "comfortable being openly trans" I mean: they themselves have acknowledged their trans identity, they are open about it with their families, and they are comfortable presenting as themselves in their environment. You need to clear all three bars as a trans kid or else you need to be extremely brave. In either case, then you have to apply the filters that I mentioned above. As trans acceptance becomes more common, those bars will lower, but there's still going to be a ceiling on how many trans people there really are, and it's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 2%.
In my high school of 2500 people, that means 50 kids across 4 grade levels. Apply filters from there.
The error that you're continuing to make here is conflating the "ceiling on how many trans people there really are," with the ceiling on how many people are willing to cynically identify as trans for the sake of gaining some advantage. While that percentage is probably less than 1% today, every advancement in trans acceptance and every facilitation of trans identification is going to cause that percentage to rise because the "cost" of publicly identifying as trans becomes less and less.
To put it another way, historically there was no advantage in American education to identifying one's self as having a learning disability. (In fact, it was probably a pretty clear disadvantage if you aspired to go to college because you'd likely be excluded from taking more advanced classes.) That changed dramatically between the 1970s and 1990s -- special assistance was introduced for students with learning disabilities and a wider range of conditions got identified as learning disabilities, including conditions that are much easier to fake one's way through a diagnosis. The result was a dramatic increase in the number of students with learning disabilities, which was initially attributed to past underdiagnosing of such disabilities, but the problem with that theory is the numbers just keep going up and up -- you can now find schools where approx. 40% of students are being categorized as having some form of learning disability. The very clear explanation is that some part of students are faking learning disabilities to gain advantages in terms of extra time on tests, etc., a point that was confirmed in the FBI investigation of the college admissions scandal a couple years back. (Here's some reporting from Vox on this issue: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/3/14/18265874/college-admissions-fraud-fbi-disability-accommodations ) It's ridiculous to think the exact same process isn't going to happen (or possibly isn't already happening) with student athletes for the same reason: when you simultaneously attach special rights to some condition and remove the negative stigma and social costs associated with that condition, you absolutely begin inviting people to fake the condition to gain the advantages associated with it.
Now this doesn't mean that the social stigma and abuse of trans individuals should continue for the sake of preserving girl's athletics! What it does mean is the eventual disappearance of natal females from the ranks of top competitors in many school sports unless bright line rules about who can compete in which divisions are maintained. I.e., you can't keep people from faking a condition, but you can say that, even if they actually have the condition, they don't get the special benefit, which then eliminates the incentive to fake the condition.
"What are they supposed to do if they want to play a team sport?"
Play the sport that corresponds to your sex. If you don't want to do that, too bad.
Like a lot of objections to trans rights, seems like you can deal with the problem of too transwomen crowding cis women out of sports if and when it actually becomes a problem.
I think “crowding out” is the wrong standard. Sports depend on fairness. Systematic unfairness becomes a problem well before it becomes common.
The undefined term "fairness" is doing a lot of work there. It's not obvious to me that letting trans women and girls play in women's sports is objectively "unfair." They presumably will be playing by the same rules as anyone else.
Its worth noting that having gendered sports teams in the first place is about making life fair, not about making the game fair. We wanted to give women and girls an opportunity to play sports and recognized that there were a variety of reasons (including both ability and culture) unisex sports teams made this hard. Basically, it was a political decision. There is a lot of reason to believe that allowing trans women and girls to play on women's and girls' teams will advance the goal of making life fair, particularly if (as will likely be the case) trans women and girls remain a fairly significant minority of the people playing the sport.
Because men and women play sports at an entirely different caliber.
See for example
https://law.duke.edu/sports/sex-sport/comparative-athletic-performance/
or a group of high school boys beating the women's soccer team
https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/
There's no comparison. Women can't compete with men in sports. That's why we created women's sports in the first place
Well, do you feel it was fair that East German women’s athletes were taking testosterone and other performance enhancers? Fairness to me means that no side has advantages beyond what are conveyed by natural talent, developed skill, or hard work. If you have two athletes, one of whom is willing to take PEDs and the other of whom is not (due to those drugs’ dangerous effects), the first athlete will have an advantage based on their willingness to take such drugs, which strikes many people as unfair since that’s not where many of us want advantages to come from. Now, some disagree and say that PEDs should be allowed because being willing to sacrifice one’s body for the sport *is* a legitimate basis for an advantage, and that’s a justifiable viewpoint! But I don’t think it’s consistent to say that most athletes can’t take hormones that allow them to compete better, while transwoman athletes (by taking drugs allowing them to compete in a more advantageous level of competition) can.
The problem with the East German women's athletes is that they were taking PEDs when it was against the rules to do so. Honestly, I think that we make too big a deal about PEDs (plenty of what people do to get better at sports is bad for them in various ways), but if the rules say "no PEDs," then you disqualify the team that took PEDs, because to do otherwise would be to disadvantage the team that followed the rules.
If the rules say "no transwomen," I'm fine disqualifying a team that sneaks a transwoman on the roster. They broke the rule and it would be unfair to the other teams that followed the rule by not adding transwomen to the roster. But that rule is just as arbitrary as any other rule in sports, and, in the same way you might add allow for designated hitters or decide that you are going to have gendered teams in the first place, you can decide that transwomen can play on the women's team.
Would it be unfair if there were one weight class in boxing? Tyson Fury would be the only champ! Or if all sports were mixed sex. What is not obvious to you is obvious to almost everyone else.
If you read further down, I address this prevalence issue.
I read it.
You're predicting that it will become a bigger issue - I'm skeptical. I don't think we're ever going to his a point where a substantial fraction of people are trans.
You talk about an arbitrary cut off - You don't have to set a cut off, you just have to occasionally look at the issue and weight the costs and benefits. Right now, it seems like we are pretty far from the costs outweighing the benefits.
Honestly, trans people playing sports isn't one of things that get me upset. As long as their is a governing body to make fair decisions, I am ok with it.
The same arguments about trans-women in sports could be made about tall people in basketball, or muscle density, etc...
I am not at advocating we do not let trans-women play sports and compete. As someone else said, apparently New Zealand sports bodies take into account a "Safety factor" in the case of Rugby.
So yeah... seems like I agree with you. At least in an agnostic way.
I'll acknowledge that this is a wedge issue, and I'm open to the idea that, maybe in the grand scheme of things, sports is not the hill to die on on.
That being said, I don't see why having a single talented trans girl dominating the sport should be any more dispiriting than having someone like Michael Phelps or Gabby Douglas. Some people just have natural advantages in sports and are going to be better than the rest, no matter how hard the rest work. I say this as someone who ran track and wrestled in high school despite being incredibly bad at both.
The problem in America is people seem more interested in confrontation than fixing problems.
I live in the UK. I follow a contact sport (rugby) where trans players also add safety risks to the mix. The governing body (RFU) has a trans policy. As far as I know, no one is angry. People understand a difficult problem is being addressed. The RFU consulted the community when drafting the policy, I think they're currently in a second consultation to improve it.
I don't know, most of the people who seem to get really concerned about the issue of trans athletes seem to be the same people who do not otherwise seem to give a damn about women's sports and make fun of the WNBA.
Negative. The people who are most concerned about transgender athletes are the other female athletes. The very athletes who absolutely give a damn about women's sports, because they play women's sports. They are just a smaller population that everyone else.
Sure, the discourse is taken up by cultural warriors on both sides.... but that is completely different than who is really affected.
I'd imagine (not having a daughter of my own and not generally caring about sports played by people of any sex or gender) that not caring about women's professional sports is a wholly separate issue from not caring about the sports one's daughter participates in while in school.
I don’t think this is true. Jon Pike is a philosopher specializing in sport who is strongly concerned about trans athletes in women’s sports precisely because of how the issue threatens to undermine the whole rationale for the enterprise. And of course, the more activists push the issue, the more we should expect Mormons sympathetic to women’s sports to get alarmed.
"Mormons" should have been "normies" (I mean, I'm sure the Mormons won't like it either).
Trans women after two/three years of hormone therapy do not have an advantage (two years in endurance sports, three in strength or speed sports). There has been quite a bit of research done on this question and the minimum required duration has ticked up as a result - note that one year is sufficient for someone who was not an athlete before transition, and the original research was about strength and endurance in the general population of trans women; it turns out that trans women who had already built muscle and fitness before transitioning take more time to lose it than the average. I wouldn't be surprised to see research showing that four or five years is necessary for an elite powerlifter who stays in elite-level training throughout transition.
I know a lot of people find that hard to believe, but trans women are not stronger or faster than cis women. I think the problem we have is that we're used to images of trans women on day one, not on day one thousand.
Kids before puberty don't have an advantage, which is why many sports have always been mixed sports up to around the age of 11. Even if the sport is segregated, there's no competitive problem with kids playing on the "other" team anyway.
If they do transition at 18, then they should be eligible to compete by the time they are a junior at college - and lots of college athletes only compete in their junior and senior years anyway, so it's perfectly reasonable to apply the two year rule.
That, of course, leaves the question of high school (and junior high) sports, which is a genuinely hard question. Hormonal transition isn't normally allowed for minors, which essentially all highschoolers are. If they started on puberty blockers at the start of puberty, then, of course, they don't accrue advantages over cis girls in the first place, and there is absolutely no good reason why a trans girl can't compete on the girls' team. If they don't start until later (either because they didn't come out before puberty, or because of difficulties accessing medication) then they will have some advantages that don't get reversed until they go onto hormone therapy as an adult. And if they aren't on puberty blockers at all, then they clearly have exactly the same physical advantages as a cis boy.
I don't know how to balance the desire to ensure that everyone has access to play sports and stay fit against the desire for an equal competitive field. This is a genuinely hard problem, especially for trans girls who are going to be able to compete in a couple of years' time when they have transitioned - if they can't play competitive sports, they have no chance of winning a scholarship, but if they can, they will unfairly dominate at 17, even though they will drop back to the level of the other girls by the time they are 20.
I think the sticking point here would be actually requiring hormone therapy to compete in the gender you identify with. From what I understand (which is not much so take it for what it's worth) you are considered a woman if you identify as a woman irregardless of whether you are on hormone therapy or otherwise taking any medical steps to transition biologically.
You're right, but the vast majority of transgender rights organisations accept the need for physical transition before trans women can be involved in high-level competitive sport. That is, they are a woman from the moment they come out, but that doesn't mean that they can compete in high-level sport.
The Olympics has a rule that most pro sports have adopted for when a trans woman is allowed to compete. There is some talk about changing it from sitting out (effectively) two years to (effectively) three years after some research on people who were at high levels of athletic fitness before transition showed that it took longer for their strength to drop to female-typical levels than it does for the general population of trans women.
The general consensus among both trans activists and sporting authorities is that at highly competitive levels, you need to sit out for 2-3 years while your body changes, and in recreational sports, we shouldn't try to put people off participation (too many people are too physically inactive as it is).
Does anybody think the trans community in America would be ok with a 3-year waiting period for full participation in women's sports?
(I doubt it, though I could be wrong.)
The Olympics has what is effectively a 2 year waiting period (the rule is that you have to get testosterone levels below 5nmol/L, which typically takes 6-12 months with higher fitness and physical activity levels at the higher end, and then you have to keep it there for a full year).
Most pro sports have adopted the same standard, just as they adopt the WADA standards for drugs (which also originate with the Olympics). The Olympics allows sports to adopt a different standard if they can evidence that; Rugby is currently looking at doing so - one proposal is an extra year of reduced testosterone.
I do not see trans activists complaining about those standards.
What I do see is a lot of people thinking that the Olympic standards are excessive for high school - but "high school" is a pretty broad range, from some events where people are competing for NCAA scholarships to others that are played entirely for the fun of participation and as an incentive to maintain fitness; some sort of compromise where trans women can participate in participation-oriented sport but not compete in competition-oriented sport until they reach the relevant standards would be one that I think most would go along with.
Not wishing to engage in pedantry about hormone levels, but having done a quick check on google: "In 2015, the IOC ruled that transgender athletes who identify as female could compete on female teams if their testosterone levels were below ten nanomoles per liter for at least 12 months before the competition. In 2019, World Athletics lowered the maximum level to five nanomoles per liter."
I make no claims of expertise and stand to be corrected on that, but I believe part of the criticism of the Olympic standards has been that the 10nmol/L level standard is still very considerably higher than female typical, and actually lies still within the normal range that is seen in males (albeit at the very bottom end of it). So it is at least possible for competitors in some sports to be qualified in terms of Olympic standards, yet they have not really reduced their testosterone levels to a point where they are going to see significant muscle loss. So they are operating in effect as very low testosterone males, not as trans people who have really crashed their testosterone levels for a prolonged period of time.
Side-note: I believe the objection in MMA also is regards to the greater bone density in males, which lets them take hits better and hit harder, and is unaffected by the reduction in testosterone.
As far as high school sports, I'm not sure why people can't come up with a statistical adjustment to account for the effects of male puberty in those sports that would allow that, e.g., athletics, cycling, etc. That way you can have the "inclusion" while still ensuring that the competition recognizes female physical and technical excellence in that particular sport in the winner. If the trans competitor manages to beat the competition even after the statistical adjustment then fair enough, we know that was a really outstanding performance and just one that reflects having gone through a different physical development pathway to the rest of the field.
Having said that, that is only going to work for non-physical contact sports. Having played high school rugby at a decent level myself, the idea of letting any boy on my old school rugby team switch to playing against girls would be just a recipe for injury (which is why I think rugby has been quite sensibly looking at this issue carefully, and I believe has banned trans-women in international women's rugby based on the science as it applies to elite level rugby).
Honestly, people should just play a bit more competitive chess. Can't think of any reason why it should matter at all in that.
should have been "not just one that reflects having gone through a different physical development pathway to the rest of the field."
The trans lifter at the the Olympics finished in dead last:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlifting_at_the_2020_Summer_Olympics_%E2%80%93_Women%27s_%2B87_kg
So maybe trans gender athletes aren't always destroying paths of female excellence.
Progressives LOVE to find "disproportionate" shares of things then claim unfairness. (In a hypothetical city, 28% of police stops are of black people but they're only 22% of the population. This gets taken as bulletproof evidence of systematic racism.)
But when there's a clear, obvious advantage for trans women athletes in women's sports, these same progressives will say "Well trans women don't win 100% of the time so it's fair."
I can only ascribe this view to willful ignorance.
If there was a clear, obvious advantage for trans women athletes in women's sports, why don't they win a lot?
There are no trans women in the WNBA, or in the top 100 of women's tennis. There was one at the last Olympics, in weightlifting, a sport that people only paid attention to because there was a trans woman in it. There are none in World Cup skiing, none in gymnastics, none on the pro golf tours. There is exactly one trans woman who plays in their country's top-level soccer league, and that's in Argentina, not a particularly highly-ranked league.
I think you just need a few examples to prove the point though. We're dealing with a small base. CeCe Telfer went from 390th place in the men's division in 2017 to winning the women's division in 2019. She was ruled ineligible from competing in the women's trials this summer but I that illustrates the relative difference in performance.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jun/24/cece-telfer-transgender-runner-olympic-trials
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/25/sport/transgender-athlete-cece-telfer-trials-olympics-spt/index.html
I think she proves the point in my longer comment. You need to be on hormones for about two years (it takes 6-12 months for testosterone levels to drop below 5 nmol/L and about a year before the physical changes to be sufficient). If you don't make people sit out for two years, then of course they will have big advantages during those two years, and the NCAA should apply the usual rules that the Olympics and other sports apply.
She clearly hasn't completed the athletic transition, so of course she has an advantage. Almost no-one denies that testosterone is a big advantage, and it takes time to get it out of the body.
Whether she will be competitive as a woman, though, we shouldn't take too seriously her performances as a freshman. Plenty of great athletes were pretty mediocre in competion against 21-22 year olds when they were 18.
Taking hormones still doesn't undue the changes that occurred in puberty. For example larger lung capacity.
But I don't think it does; unless I'm missing something about this specific case. She started transitioning four years ago and was ruled ineligible in June at for the trials.
I think we're aligned more broadly though. In this case - seems clear she shouldn't have been able to compete back in 2019. I think that's the bigger point. Similar situation happened in Connecticut.
There is a clear, obvious advantage for men competing against women. This is the justification for women's sports. How dare you gaslight us?
Of course there is a clear, obvious advantage for men.
Trans women are not men.
I don't just mean that ideologically, I mean biologically. They have female-typical endocrine systems because they take oestrogen and either a testosterone antagonist or have had an orchidectomy. This changes their athletic abilities.
All pro/Olympic level sports require trans women to reach female-typical levels of hormones (which typically takes 6-12 months, with athletic trans women towards the upper end of that range) and then stay there for a year before they start competing against cis women, and continue to stay there throughout their time as competitors. Since those are normal levels for trans women, that's not a particular challenge. This removes the athletic advantages that men have over women in the vast majority of cases.
There is some evidence that some sports might need a longer period - particularly those that are very dependent on strength. The IOC deliberately allows sports to apply stricter criteria if appropriate to that sport. AIUI, rugby union is currently studying whether it needs to apply a stricter rule for exactly this reason.
There is exactly one Olympic sport that does not apply any requirement for trans women: that's equestrianism, where men and women compete as equals anyway.
Trans women are men. One necessarily must be male in order to be a trans woman. The term makes no sense otherwise.
Women are not hormone levels. Women are female humans. Males cannot become females, and even the simulacra they can become are different from the real thing in a thousand ways.
"Trans women are not men."
Incorrect. The differences start in the womb, and then really accelerate during puberty. Andrew Sullivan had an excellent podcast on the topic a while back. (6-18-21)
Or you can check out Carole Hooven's book on testosterone
Women's sports are for women. Not for women and also men who artificially weaken themselves. What sense would that make? Think!
Caster Semenya (who isn't trans but intersex) is probably the most high-profile example
Semenya is not a trans woman, though! And I'm not even all that clear that she is intersex. She's a woman with elevated testosterone, and there has never been a medical disclosure that makes clear why that is, whether it's an intersex condition (in which case she is an intersex woman), or not. Either way, she is a cis woman; she was identified as female at birth and has never rejected that identity.
Obviously, having elevated testosterone levels is an athletic advantage, but it doesn't really matter why she has elevated testosterone levels in a sporting context. Having a maximum testosterone level for all women would make far more sense than having different rules depending on the medical cause for that testosterone level. Plenty of female athletes have some sort of elevated testosterone level.
I think I disagree with your last sentences. Caster being born with elevated testosterone is like Michael Phelps having freakishly long arms—a natural advantage of the kind world class athletes are bound to have. Letting athletes elevate their testosterone, in the other hand, gives an incentive for unethical athletes to improve their performance. It creates unfairness in the way an inborn advantage doesn’t.
Wait, do you think I am a progressive lol? It just seems like it is not obvious if trans athlete have a big advantage post-transition. Like Richard says below, I would expect them to win a lot more shit if they did.
"becoming the oldest weightlifter to qualify for the games... At 43 she was the fourth oldest weightlifter to compete at the Olympics"
That probably has something to do with her performance....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Hubbard
I don't think the concept "dead last at the Olympics" means what you think it means. That is not a randomly selected population, rather, it's the population of athletes filtered down to the top performer(s) in a country.
I'm not saying trans athletes do or d it not have an advantage; I do not know. I'm just saying coming in last in an Olympic contest is not proof either way.
I don't really know where I stand on this either. I just heard a lot about this athlete in the run up to the Olympics and people made it out like she had this huge advantage and I was surprised at how poorly she did.
It looks like she was disqualified for some reason but the raw scores are competitive with third place?
Those "raw scores" are the weights she attempted, but she didn't successfully lift any of them.
It looks like she simply failed (she didn't manage to lift the weights): https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/58054891
I don't think this changes your point at all but everything is in kg
She was the number one junior in New Zealand, then quit lifting entirely because she couldn't face competing while pretending to be a man. We have no idea how good she would have been in her prime; she wasn't mediocre for a pro, she was an elite junior who gave up before reaching the pro level for non-athletic reasons.
The age thing is fair comment - to reach 7th in the world in your forties is pretty unusual.
Yeah, the problem is that we're trying to generalise from a tiny handful of examples. When you only have an N<10 then you really can't tell anything.
The trans sports issue is the new trans bathroom issue in that it’s being significantly overblown (“men will pretend to be trans women to attack your daughters in the bathroom” / “men will pretend to be trans women to beat your daughters in sports”) because not enough people understand it. First of all, because the vast majority of trans women aren’t interested in competing in sports anyways. Second of all, because (especially at the school level) a trans kid who is either on puberty blockers or who is taking steps for medical transition doesn’t have the kind of biological-sex-based advantages everyone is so worried about.
Its sort of weird that you say the issue is overblown because it doesn't happen that often.
Yet, the men becoming pregnant happens even less, and already the CDC is changing commonly understood language.
There is a double standard when it come to how many people are affected before we should act argument.
By this argument, there's a double standard on all minority rights, because there are more people who want the right to be racist than people who want the right to not have racism done against them.
You obviously have to weigh 1) how much you believe that there's a basic right to dignity affected by the standard, 2) how burdensome the issue is to the majority, and 3) how much it affects the minority.
If you believe using inclusive language that covers trans men when discussing reproductive health is a big burden and that making trans people navigating medical care identify as cis to get relevant healthcare is a small burden that doesn't affect their dignity, than yeah, things are out of control. But it's not because there's a double standard, it's because you don't know any trans people who've had to deal with doctors who are bad dealing with trans health.
There's actually not more people who want to be racist, but your point is taken.
And you are exactly right about weighing of the different issues.
For instance, I a disinclined to support gender neutral phrases in place of "pregnant women". The number of men who get pregnant is infitesimal, and I have to imagine the effort to change the language of 99.99999% of the population to avoid the phrase pregnant women is silly.
However, there is an argument to be made that not letting transgender women play sports is a lot more significant, and I am actually inclined to let trans-women play high school and college sports and let sports body sort out the medical issues of that. Though I do have sympathy for the cis-women who might feel differently.
I am going to guess that a trans-person who has transitioned knows there way around the medical community and has the experience to get the right medical help. You know, since being trans required continued medical support for monitoring of hormones and significant surgery.
I mean, if Im Trans... I have had a year of counseling, hormone blockers, and then surgery, I go to the doctor to have follow up appointments, and then I have gotten pregnant, I might just be familiar with the medical community to know where to get understanding and needed medical care. At this point, I suspect... if it were me.... having to explain to the nurse or doctor that I am having issue X as a man, might not be the biggest thing in the world.
Then again.... maybe we should just remove the gender connotation from words used to describe biological traits.
Use Pregnant Females to describe people with XX issues.... and the word women to describe gender identity. So you could be a male man or a female man, or a female woman or a female man.
Especially considering the whole debate comes down to language.
I am adding that Richard Gadson above made a strong argument as to why the terminology is important, and I am actually sympathetic to accurate medical descriptions (people with uterous or people with breasts or people who are pregnant) in the context of medical care.
The more I think about it, the more using this language makes sense on medical forms and in medical journals.
It's not even being applied uniformly in those spaces though. The Lancet recently got called out for using such inclusive language with regards to women ("bodies with vaginas") but not the equivalent for men. But more to the point, I would think that transgender man or woman is going to be significantly more useful for medical forms than "bodies with vaginas" or "bodies with prostates".
Except, the other side never used the phrase "overblown", and isn't trying to change a majority to adapt to tiny fraction of the population.
Transgender athletes could really affect elite sports. Yes, there aren’t that many transgender people, but there is only one olympic champion. Champions tend to be genetic outliers because being the best in the world isn’t normal. Lots of women beat me at pickleball, but the best men would always beat the best women.
The winning time in the 2019 Georgia boys high school 400m championship was 48.08. I chose that event at random. In the 100m, the Georgia male high school champion ran 10.51. The winning time in the 2020 womens olympics was 48.36 in the 400 and 10.61 in the 100. A generic 17 or 18 year old male state champion could be the women’s world champion, in events where performance peaks in your mid twenties and high school athletes rarely make the olympics and almost never make the olympic finals.
That's assuming that any male athlete could declare themselves female and still compete, which is not currently the case and is not a proposal from anyone who knows anything about sports. Trans women have to undergo hormonal transition, which wipes out loads of muscle mass, which means they run a lot slower. That's why there are rules on this, and that Georgia high school champion would not be returning those times after transition.
There are people who know nothing about sports who make some completely ridiculous statements about sports. I have seen a bunch of feminists (who never watch sports) make claims that the only reason that women have separate teams from men is because of sexism, and if women were allowed to compete, then all the teams would be 50:50. People at that level of knowledge of sports do make outlandish claims about trans women.
I hadn't heard as much about hormonal transition wiping out loads of muscle mass - especially if an athlete was exercising to maintain it. What is the expected loss rate in those situations?
The studies vary, a lot, in part because a lot of them are done on non-athletes.
IIRC, the best evidence is on grip strength (not directly relevant to sport, but clearly related to muscle mass/strength), where there is very little change in the first nine months and then it drops about 1% per month for about two years, to about 80% of the original value (IIRC from the meta-analysis, the rate of about 1% per month is solid, but the stop-point and thus the total change is not well-evidenced because most studies were too short). Average cis women's grip strength is about 80% of cis men's.
I find it equally possible that we get some good regulations in place to prevent trans women who have an unfair advantage from competing and everyone's happy. As I mentioned up thread ... the CeCe Telfer situation is a good example. She won the 2019 women's Div. II 400m but was just ruled ineligible in June for the Olympic trials. Seems clear should she should have also been ruled ineligible for the prior 2019 race.
Most people also got the bathroom thing totally backwards. The anti-trans people wanted women to be harassed in bathrooms if they don’t look feminine enough, but *also* wanted extremely masculine looking people to use the women’s room. That just seems like a recipe for harassment.
Yeah, in practice the Fox News-ification of the bathroom issue mostly meant that the number of butch cis women being harassed for trying to use a public restroom skyrocketed.
I get the concern but is this really a problem? How many female athletes will ever compete against a trans woman?
I grant there's some level of unfairness, but it was also "unfair" to have female tennis players compete against the Williams sisters in their prime, because (in part) of their "unfair" genetic endowment.
Not even in the same category. There are high school boys(about 300 I believe) that can be top women Olympic athletes in running.
https://law.duke.edu/sports/sex-sport/comparative-athletic-performance/
A high school boys soccer team also beat the USA women's soccer team.
https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/
There's a reason why we separate men and women's sports. It's because women literally can't compete. Not even in the same ballpark.
This always seemed like an issue that is legitimate (I've have cis-female friends lose podium positions in ultramarathons to tans women) but also I think is solvable if we were actually interested in solving the problem (rather than scoring rhetorical points). We already have various models for separating competitions into sub-categories roughly based on ability. In (non-elite) triathlon you compete based on age group (because a 65 year old is obviously not going to be competitive with a bunch of people in their 20s-30s) for example.
It wouldn't be immediately obvious how you do it (even triathlon age groups break down into men's/women's) but maybe something like how football leagues work in Europe. There is no gender segregation but you have a "premier league" with the best teams/individual athletes and then a series of other leagues which still have their own tournaments and championships. And everyone competes in the most competitive league they can actually win in.
The Republican solution of making people play based on their birth sex doesn’t make sense though if you are trying to get rid of an advantage. Trans men would still be able to compete in the cis-women category under proposed legislation. The only solution that makes sense would be to have a category where both birth sex and current gender identity is cis-women and an everyone else category.
Trans women after transitioning enough don't have an advantage. But it takes time, and high school isn't enough time.
For the Olympics, or the WNBA, or whatever, telling them to sit out two or three years would be fine. For high school, that's your entire time at high school, and you aren't allowed to start until 18 (or 16 in some states).
There's a reason why there's almost no trans women at the Olympic or pro level in sports - once they have lost the advantage of all that testosterone, trans women have no physical advantages and all the social disadvantages of being trans, plus the forced two year gap in training tends to end their careers.
“…once they have lost the advantage of all that testosterone, trans women have no physical advantages…”
Do they shrink? Does sexual dimorphism cease to be a thing?
Muscle mass, yes. Height, no. But no league segregates people by height.
Brain structure? Bone mass? Skeletal geometry?
Exactly. A 6' trans woman has no advantage over a 6' cis woman.
This will mean that trans women will be slightly more common in the higher weight classes for boxing and weightlifting and so on, as trans women are, on average, a bit bigger than cis women. But that doesn't make the competition unfair.
“Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
If, as you say, most high school athletes haven’t completed transition until basically after high school then it seems like a blanket birth-sex female, current identity female sports category makes a lot of sense.
Leave it to the olympics or pro sports to measure testorone level or whatever they are currently doing.
Depends how competitive the specific high school sports are.
At lower levels, there are two values to sport - participation and competition. You need to balance excluding some people from participation against ensuring that the competition is fair.
I'd probably go for a rule that the top competitive level of HS sports is restricted, but not JV sports or small-school sports. That will cost some trans girls their chance at a college scholarship, but I don't see how to avoid that problem.
Also, if they have puberty blockers early enough, then trans girls never undergo male puberty and never accrue an advantage in the first place. You could certainly include that fraction.
Actually it’s not just trans women, there are women born female who have elevated testosterone and as I understand it they are now required to take testosterone-supressing drugs to qualify. Clearly a transwoman would be subject to these same rules, as well as the rules about being on hormone treatments for some number of years before becoming eligible. The ideal solution for school sports would be puberty-suppressing drugs which would put trans girls on the same level as cis girls.
Someone who is born a man and goes on testosterone blockers as a teen or adult will still have physical advantages over someone who was born a woman, e.g. being taller on average but also I think other things?
Yes. Bone density, for example.
Chappelle is clearly more pro trans than the majority of America. He would vote for the Equality Act. He’s not being canceled for saying that trans people shouldn’t have rights; he’s being canceled for essentially saying “sure, trans women are women, but…”
I think a lot of people are having trouble understanding why the words are of paramount importance. Feels like an overwhelming concern only for people who have no material concerns.
I like Dave Chappelle, but I don't think that clip of him calling Ohio a state full of poor white people who love heroin would play very well in a Senate race in Ohio.
They know he's a comedian. I think it would play quite well.
Like you, I watched "The Closer" solely so that I could make my own decision about The Discourse. My verdict? Chapelle spent a gratuitous portion of his time (over 50%??) poking fun at trans people. It's clear that he's been deeply affected by the pseudo-cancellation attempts from the LGBTQ+ community so far, and his reaction has been to double down + make a few friends from within that population that are on his side. That alone is reason enough to oppose "the doomed politics of shunning"- it doesn't work, it backfires.
You say he's a comic and that stand-up is not political; I couldn't disagree more. Comics have a long history of political commentary that does in fact deeply impact culture over time. Google "reverse racism comic" and see a standup bit that is shown in DEI trainings to dismiss the idea that one can be racist against white people and you'll recall how sticky some of these ideas can be. So, for someone like Chapelle, he has a lot of influence over how a lot of people approach these issues, whether he likes it or not (I think he does, as he chose to spend half of his time on this single topic).
My personal belief is that a segment of the population is more or less born gay, and an even smaller portion of the population is born with such an extreme mismatch between their biological sex and their gender-associated traits/personality that transitioning makes a lot of sense. These folks are entitled to respect, decency, and if they wish, privacy. They are not entitled to never be swept up in cultural commentary, nor is someone expressing that they disagree with a trans person necessarily transphobic. I am sensitive to the fact that for trans people in particular, they are constantly faced with people who don't "believe" them, or portray them as overly dramatic. Most of them just want to live their life in peace (and I can't imagine too many opt for the urinal if there's a stall available).
The activists within this group, of whom the most extreme are the most visible, have made it their life's mission to shift hearts and minds on the topic of gender, to convince everyone they meet to think about gender in the same way they do. I believe their motivations are actually good- they are trying to make the world a safer, more accepting place for others like them. When folks with a platform, like Dave, use that platform to push back, it of course feels like not just a defeat but an existential threat. Of course they will push back even harder. The response that got me thinking most was Terra Field's Twitter thread listing the names of Black and Hispanic trans women who've been murdered over the past year, pointing out they are not offended because they are dead. Her point is clear: platforming influencers who delegitimize transness as a state of being increase the likelihood that trans people's lives will be taken violently.
Here is the thing though.... I think Dave Chappelle actually tried to address this, though not directly enough because no one is talking about it. Dave's bit about DaBaby (who, full disclosure, I'd never heard of) was that people are enraged over his homophobic comments, but *no one is speaking out about his murdering of people.* What most directly caused the death of these trans women- Jokes Dave Chapelle made, or people choosing to pull out a weapon and murder other people? Murder is on the rise in our nation and it's taboo to talk about it- why? Many of the same activists who want to deplatform Chapelle also want to defund the police- do they care about saving lives or not?
In the end, I didn't find the special all that funny (I chuckled at his MLK impressions, directing people to oil up for the Pride parade). I found it pretty juvenile but if that's people's jam, ok. I think people who are trying to influence the discourse have every right to speak out against his views, share their own views, write their own anti-Chapelle comedy routines, etc. I think the focus on Sarandos instead of Chapelle is telling- people don't want to engage in dialogue, they want opposing voices silenced entirely. They want the gatekeepers of pop culture to pick a side. They're entitled to advocate for that too, and I'm entitled to shrug it off.
One final note... over the past year or so, I've started to move to the "gone too far" end of that Pew survey. The exploding number of teens who identify as trans or non-binary sure seems to indicate this is more than people expressing their innate traits and has become a social trend. I would not have a problem with this if it weren't so often leading to life-altering medication and surgery on minors. I am not a TERF, but I am a feminist, and I feel strongly that both men and women can feel free to express themselves in any way they wish without needing to alter their biological state to match centuries-old stereotypes about what range of personalities or interests are acceptable for each biological sex. If Chapelle were set on using his platform to challenge the pro-trans orthodoxy, I wish he'd done it in a more thoughtful way. But that's not his schtick.
"The exploding number of teens who identify as trans or non-binary sure seems to indicate this is more than people expressing their innate traits and has become a social trend. I would not have a problem with this if it weren't so often leading to life-altering medication and surgery on minors."
You're being much, much more charitable than I am inclined to be.
I must admit that I find this incomprehensible, because I can't fathom wanting to be a woman. Thus, I'm not about to judge anyone who feels trapped in their own body, so much so that it requires radical modification to alleviate that feeling.
The problem is that the social aspects of this and how they're interfering with effectively helping those who have those feelings is absolutely *damning* towards the activist class.
Questioning a person's feelings is a necessary part of all medical treatment, period, and most especially psychological treatment, which should and must be the frontline treatment for gender dysphoria. Yet we have probably 80% of the "trans activist + allies" community saying that any questioning is profoundly hateful and attempting to destroy the careers of those medical professionals who say it's needed.
Mark my words... we will soon see a great number of 20-something girls and boys who have immense regrets about body modification that cannot be undone and a massive attendant uptick in suicides, all because this community is so damningly insecure that it can't even tolerate proper medical evaluation and treatment of its (potential) members.
I can forgive a lot, but to willfully make this problem worse in every way is not forgivable, and most of today's activist community is doing just that, damn them.
Yeah… I am sympathetic to these concerns for sure. My instinct is that this has tipped over into social contagion territory, which does change the calculus a lot. I think a lot of adult activists are projecting their own struggles onto teens- they think, “wow my life would have been so much better if I’d been able to transition prior to puberty, so I am supportive of others being able to.” Their decision to transition was so difficult and complex and came as adults, they can’t imagine teenagers making the same choice unless it’s based in innate traits. My cousin, who is trans, once posted a meme comparing the exploding trend to the rise in left-handed students after teachers stopped forcing people to use their right hand. To her, they’re equivalently innate, and the spike is just the latent occurrence that has heretofore been suppressed culturally. My instinct is to disagree, but this is arguably unknowable. In the end, I defer to people to choose for themselves- EXCEPT when it comes to allowing or encouraging life-altering choices in minors. I agree that intensive psychological assistance should be the first, second, and third step for gender dysphoric youth, and medical interventions should be minimized/delayed to as close to adulthood as possible. Adults can knock themselves out and I’ll happily use any pronouns they like. (Though I do find singular “they” tedious but that’s my change-aversion.)
“wow my life would have been so much better if I’d been able to transition prior to puberty, so I am supportive of others being able to.”
Again, I am sympathetic, but that does not mean there should be no obstacles, no questioning, no medical or psychological evaluation. And right now, the state of practice pulls the trigger on puberty blockers almost immediately. It also seems, based on what I'm reading, to treat psychological screening and treatment as pro forma options to be breezed through to get to the main event, hormone and surgical treatments.
I have no doubt that this has something to do with how lucrative the last is, in particular, and the fact that the activists are lining up to support a deeply exploitative and potentially murderous medical practice is, again, a damning indictment of their humanity and judgment.
"My cousin, who is trans, once posted a meme comparing the exploding trend to the rise in left-handed students after teachers stopped forcing people to use their right hand. To her, they’re equivalently innate, and the spike is just the latent occurrence that has heretofore been suppressed culturally."
This is patently ludicrous, and I think we all know this. Educators and parents historically had to take deeply invasive, borderline-abusive measures to prevent large numbers of children from writing with their left hands. The same was true, to a slightly lesser extent, with same-sex attractions. It took real work on the part of societies to suppress those inclinations, because they are prevalent.
Your cousin is engaged in heavily motivated reasoning; some of it, I'm sure, is the altruistic motives you described above. But I'm equally certain that much of this sentiment stems from "if more folks are like us we won't be so alone, so vulnerable."
I'm sure no one is thinking this explicitly, but the undercurrent seems to be that a few mistaken transitions is an acceptable price to pay for being part of a larger community whose interests will be taken serious. They desperately *want* for it to be true that a few percent of the population are trans, instead of well under one percent.
Again, this well-meaning but completely *wrong* desire is going to lead, within a decade, to a huge number of young people with deep regrets and a great, great amount of suffering and death. All avoidable.
"I agree that intensive psychological assistance should be the first, second, and third step for gender dysphoric youth, and medical interventions should be minimized/delayed to as close to adulthood as possible. Adults can knock themselves out and I’ll happily use any pronouns they like."
Agreed in full.
"(Though I do find singular “they” tedious but that’s my change-aversion.)"
I was trained that the third-person they is the proper non-gendered singular in English, so completely comfortable with it.
I think it’s possible that maybe in the future, people will become less attached to their genders and broadly identify as queer. Would be interesting. But teenagers are stupid and irrational, and should generally not be trusted to make any kind of permanent life decision.
" Yet we have probably 80% of the "trans activist + allies" community saying that any questioning is profoundly hateful and attempting to destroy the careers of those medical professionals who say it's needed"
This strikes me as bullshit. The people trying to destroy medical professionals are the people who want it to be legally considered child abuse to give kids puberty blockers or hormone replacements. Every conversation about underage transgender people I've ever seen the pro-trans side emphasized that kids go through psychological counseling first to explore those feelings before they move on to discussions with medical practitioners about stopping their puberty with hormone blockers.
I mean there can be more than one group trying to destroy medical professionals. Trans activists really did get Kenneth Zucker fired, for instance.
I do not care what it "strikes you as". I am not here to pop whatever bubble has insulated you from the discourse of the past year.
I will simply point out that numerous medical professionals going on record to say that standard treatments in the US proceed far too quickly to puberty blockers, then hormones, then transition surgeries have been positively savaged by the activist community, and many have lost jobs or suffered damage to careers and practices.
Go read more. Until then, don't bother replying to me.
If you think "probably 80% of" anyone in a group is doing something outrageous, there's probably a problem with your perceptions somewhere- either you're hyperbolizing the size of the outraged party or you're underplaying the awfulness of the thing they're outraged over.
FWIW, Terra posted a followup to her twitter thread, which I thought was pretty measured and thoughtful: https://rainofterra.com/it-was-never-about-dave-9aee8b765978
DaBaby is a rapper, just FYI the guy he shot in the Walmart wasn't transgender.
Chappelle had a joke about how elizabeth smart wasn't smart because her captors didn't tie her up all the time and she didn't escape, he had a joke about how kobe bryant's rape victim couldn't have been raped because she had other men's semen on her underwear, he had another joke about how Michael Jackson performing oral sex on children he invited to his residence made him a good host.
I find this all very weird as someone familiar with his standup, he says incredibly offensive things all the time, if you don't like offensive humor he isn't your guy. Its weird to me that saying your team terf and that transwomen are like wearing blackface is worse than any of that.
There's a very weird thing happening in trans discourse right now and Matt is a bit afraid to wade into that so he went with his usual schtick here
tell me more
I don't know more I'm still trying to understand it. I'm hoping someone like Matt will shed some light
I don't think people are against "offensive humor" - they're against humor that "punches down" a/k/a humor that's offensive to people who are oppressed and thus sanctified. Elizabeth Smart is white, it's fine for Chappelle to punch her.
Raped children is standard black comedy, like dead baby jokes. It's so awful that it wraps back around into absurdism to be making jokes about.
I mean, it's subjective, right? In their view, the answer is no. YMMV.
The difference is that he was saying most of that stuff in 2003, not 2021.
The most diabolical draws ever.
I went back to youtube and Paulh is bringing up some Dave Chappelle classics!
Matt, google these jokes, so you know what funny is!
I am a suburban father with middle school aged children. The prevalence of identity issues in school is honestly shocking. I've been supportive of most left wing causes throughout my life and have consistently voted for democrats but the identity and gender politics of the woke left is a bridge too far. Just last night I said to my wife that while I would never vote for him I'm starting to understand why some people voted for Trump. If the democrats keep going down this road they can count me out.
I am in the same boat as you.
For example, my elementary daughter's social studies book discusses Native Americans in our state, and the topics are very measured and historical. But there were two sentences that stuck out like sore thumbs within the chapter (about 1 hours worth of reading out-loud). First, in the religion and customs section, it noted that some Native Americans believed in dual spirits and that both genders could be in one body. It had no flow with the previous sentence and nothing was added after. I thought it was really hamfisted in there, and honestly unnecessary.
The second sentence was when the Spanish came and forced the Native Americans onto the missions and to accept Catholicism. Another forced sentence along the lines of, "The Indians were not allowed to practice dual spirit belief." Yes, the book keeps calling Native Americans "Indians," probably more often than not, but we *have* to put in two sentences about how they were woke.
I will never ever vote for Trump or any one like him, but I can see why many other parents in my school do because, to them, this is a cultural push that really didn't need to be in our elementary child's social studies.
I don’t really read Slate anymore, but this anecdote (and the parents’ ambivalence) was a pretty disturbing portrait of modern American middle school: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/10/kids-social-justice-vigilantes-parenting-advice-care-feeding.html
A lot of the letters to Slate are fake anyway.
The issue is not that they’re fake, it’s that the responses are very much real.
The correct reply here would be something along the lines of, “What the hell is wrong with you people?! You need to get your whole family in the therapy immediately!!”
Having read a couple of Prudence columns over the last year or two, Slate needs to fire everyone who’s ever moonlit that desk and blacklist them all from journalism forever.
No one who believes the shit those columnists believe can possibly be relied on to provide impartial and accurate information or analysis on any topic.
Fair point. I'll never forget this line from the most recent departed Prudie (Daniel Lavery I think?): "private property is stupid and fake" in justifying theft. Sadly, he wasn't even the only Slate advice columnist to endorse theft. I stopped reading that site a while ago.
This should be confined to the realm of satire.
The correct word for what’s being described here is “thoughtcrime.”
Or “not disowning your cop parent at age 14” crime?
I’d vote for Trump if he were running against my millennial cousin. I am an atheist who will defend Christian civilization
Well, remember this isn’t Democrats, capital D. Wokescolds pale in comparison to our democracy falling.
My cold take is that the people canceling Chapelle think it’s OK to make fun of poor whites and Jews because that’s “punching up” or whatever.
Also apparently OK: defending Michael Jackson, calling his accusers outright liars and saying that he would have raped Macaulay Culkin in the 80's.
His accusers do have holes in their stories though, so that's not an unreasonable position. As a comparison to Matt's piece here, I'd wager that a substantial portion of Americans and even a majority of black people believe in MJ's innocence.
I think what you said perfectly illustrates Matt's broader point. But Chappelle also had like a five-minute bit about certain body parts belonging to children that I am not willing to write down explicitly.
His point was that the HBO documentary was gross and offensive and he used outdated stereotypes to make it. Somehow everyone seems to understand that. But when it comes to the LGBTQ jokes, suddenly a bunch of people—most of whom are not LGTB or Q—take everything at face value and assume bad faith.
Chappelle's over-arching point was that sometimes LGBTQ people invoke white privilege and are themselves punching down or otherwise overlooking the plight of other minorities in pursuit of their own goals. He has a whole bit about a car full of LGBTQ people that illustrates that worldview perfectly and yah, it uses some dated and offensive imagery. Yet, somehow that crosses the line, whereas using the same construction in the context of pedophilia is just ducky. (For the record I thought both were illuminating and hilarious.)
I think the reason is that Chappelle is incredibly funny, even to joyless scolds, so they cannot credibly condemn him or his specials in their entirety.
Ah yeah I get you. I guess Dave's skill is that he's able to offend so many groups that he just confuses his enemies haha.
Gender is an ancient category, sanctified by nature. Every one of my ancestors has successfully reproduced as a male or a female. Trans people stand athwart history and evolution. I do not doubt that gender dysphoria is real. No one would take on all the shit and contempt that trans people deal with for shits and giggles. Though real, gender dysphoria is a disorder, a failure of the mind to harmonize with the body, a rejection of the constraints that nature imposes. Those who suffer from gender dysphoria deserve sympathy, but their plight should never be normalized, much less glamorized. The urban fad for gender fluidity is dangerous.
Teenagers who are unhappy with their birth gender should try really hard to deal with it before transitioning. Things might get better, and it’s best to try to harmonize with nature before making irreversible changes to one’s body. Any person born with a disorder, be it depression, anxiety, dyslexia or a speech impediment, should try really hard to manage and treat it. I stutter and stuttering has really hurt my life. The world would be easier for me if everyone stuttered or if stuttering were glamorous, but those are velleities. The best course for me is to treat my disorder and try to stutter as little as possible while asking for patience when it takes me longer than normal to get something out. I well understand that this is an imposition on my listeners and that things would be better for everyone if I always spoke fluently.
Some people stutter so horribly that they learn sign language and join the deaf community. I feel sorry for them because that choice is very limiting. Similarly, performing a gender for which one lacks the essential reproductive equipment is also limiting. At a minimum, it destroys the ability to become a biological parent and drastically narrows your dating pool. Still, just as I understand that speaking could be so painful that one acts deaf, I understand that being masculine could be so painful that one chooses to act like a woman. This is a fraught adaptation to a disorder and should not be anyone’s ideal.
Nothing that exists ultimately comes from elsewhere than "nature". These arguments sound all too similar to "natural law" arguments against homosexuality, especially the part about destroying the ability to become a biological parent and drastically narrowing one's dating pool. As a gay man I have a much smaller pool of potential partners than I would if I pretended to be straight, in addition to biological reproduction being very unlikely. I still wouldn't trade it for anything, and don't want anyone to feel sorry for me. The tolerance you offer trans people is a cold gruel, dependent on their wearing a metaphorical hair shirt and beating their chests in unceasing agony. I think trans people – who are not doomed to sorrow but can become happy, fulfilled and at peace through transition – are no more or less part of the beautifully complex tapestry of humanity as anyone else, and enrich the world accordingly. Thinking in complex and sometimes difficult ways about what gender is, where it comes from, and how to free everyone to have the best life they can, is not a burden on society, but a valuable challenge.
Ultimately, whether being trans is “fraught” is an empirical question. I’ve read that suicide rates amoung trans people are very high, any characteristic that carries with it a high risk of wanting to self-liquidate is fraught.
Homosexuality was certainly fraught 50 years ago and has become less fraught as tolerance has increased. I’ll certainly concede that greater tolerance will make being trans less fraught, but that does not mean that trans people would be as happy as cis people or that most people who feel gender dysphoria should transition.
At a minimum, we lack robust data to prove that most people who transition are happy. Shouldn’t that be grounds for caution?
I think you're trying to make a case that being trans might just make people unhappy innately. But if society defines being trans as "abnormal", I don't know how you'd, as an empirical matter, ever separate the experience of being trans from the experience of being trans in a society that defines being trans as abnormal.
Why isn't our default view more libertarian - letting trans people do what they want to do and not using the power of the state to limit their choices?
I should think that people who are distressed and unhappy at their body would have an elevated risk of suicide, regardless of whether it’s normalized or not.
Also, perhaps trans people are biologically more prone to depression. Who knows? Who cares? Women appear to be more prone to it than men as well, but generally we don’t consider that a sign that femaleness is unnatural and must be corrected.
The was just a piece in the NYT on considerable research showing that liberals aren’t as happy as conservatives. That doesn’t make being a liberal wrong. It just makes you grouchy.
Much like how we don't need the first amendment to protect already popular speech, if "freedom" means anything, it's the ability to do things that the mainstream may not agree with--even if there is a risk of negative consequences to the individual.
Of course, as a society we should review and possibly limit behavior (freedom) with marked negative externalities, but this doesn't really seem like one..?
A couple of comments:
-I don’t think our value as humans is directly tied to an ability to have heterosexual sex that results in pregnancy and birth.
-if we want to elevate what nature has created and “sanctified,” nature has also created, for example, the ability for an individual with XY genotype to be insensitive to testosterone, so they have all the secondary sexual characteristics of women. They’re just not able to have children. Nature created this too!
-I don’t think anyone’s choice of gender expression has a bearing on my choice to live as a cisgendered, heterosexual woman with a queer vibe. I like it that people get their choice in gender and sexual expression, including me. Why not?
Sarah B: This issue would be less fraught if only your "live and let live" vibe were the norm. But the activists don't want neutrality.
I think it’s important to be really precise in where we aim our discomfort and our criticism. You can aim it at trans people, or you can aim it at trans activism and its consequences. David Abbott reads more like the former, and MY reads more like the latter.
I thought the David Abbot post above that you responded to read quite neutral. My initial inclination was to "like" both of your posts. They both came across to me as well considered.
I certainly agree that there is far more to life than procreation, I am
44 and only have one kid, if I thought that spreading my genes were the be all and end all, I would have many more. My sexuality flows from an ancient reproductive impulse but has become largely decoupled from it. I don’t want to get anyone pregnant.
Homosexual acts are a fine exercise in mutual masturbation. I do not use that term derisively, I think that sharing sexual joy and intimacy with reproduction off the table is very civilized and should be taught and encouraged.
A teenager in a civilized country who experiments with same sex partners risks very little. They don’t even risk pregnancy. A practical father might rather his teenage daughter fool around with other girls than boys— less risk of disease, pregnancy and rape. Furthermore, a young woman can experiment with same sex partners without greatly compromising her future ability to date cud men and get pregnant.
Nature certainly creates gender ambiguous people, just like it creates trisomy 21 (down’s syndrome) or people with speech impediments. Meiotic division often misfires— half of all pregnancies end in a spontaneous abortion, and most of those embryos had worse defects than Downs.
Just as Downs people will always be a small minority because they are usually infertile and require care to survive, trans gender people will always be a minority because fertility would collapse if too many people were trans. Being trans is necessarily a fairly rare exception to the gendered categories that nature has imposed.
To your third point - that's why trans people in women's sports is one of the big wedge issues. The other is children just out of puberty being encouraged and / or allowed to start transitioning. Neither is a purely a live-and-let-live position
Sounds like you think no one has ever told kids that maybe they shouldn’t transition, and we need to start doing that before doing transition immediately when they first mention it. I could see how that would be good advice in a hypothetical world where this is what is happening.
But this bears about as much connection to reality as the idea that obese people maybe haven’t yet heard that obesity is bad and maybe we should spend some time trying to talk them out of obesity before doing anything else for their health. It’s a reassuring fantasy, but not very accurate.
This seems in contrast to the recent statements by trans-specialists Drs. Marci Bowers and Erica Anderson. They say that current standards of treatment are often reckless and poorly informed.
It may be in contrast but it does not at all disagree with what Kenny said.
Well, the question is which version is more representative? Are doctors recklessly prescribing puberty blockers based on a ten minute chat or are they resisting giving them out until their hand is forced? The answer is probably both, but then we should acknowledge that.
I found this a really interesting read: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/why-are-transgender-people-immune-to-optical-illusions/
To briefly summarize, transgender people are less susceptible to certain optical illusions and are more likely to have dissociative conditions. It suggests to me that there is something deeper going on, and that it's almost certainly not as simple as there being some hidden sex determinant we just don't know yet. Right now the best treatment seems to be gender-affirming surgery, but we should be open to the possibility that this may not always be the best standard of care (and perhaps even welcome it, as surgery is never without risk or complications).
Making permanent medical changes to a person's body to conform it to a culturally created gender identity does, in very perverse way, assume, essentialize, reify, reconfirm, etc, the very culturally constructed gender identities it is trying to challenge. As you say, it kind of gets the order of priority wrong - a quick bandaid fix because it's easier to have a medical procedure on yourself than change society. So it can be a little incoherent and certainly something that should only be done on consenting adults.
But aside from likely agreeing on the need to protect children from being influenced to make permanent changes to their body to conform to cultural gender identities, I couldn't disagree more with your statement that "The urban fad for gender fluidity is dangerous".
Allowing individuals to define themselves, rather than be limited by "ancient" or essentialized cultural constructs like race or gender identity is a huge advance in human freedom. We should celebrate it, even if some of the activists do go over the top or miss the mark in some ways.
This is one of the difficulties in this debate – it scrambles alliances such that people of basic decency on either side who agree that an effeminate boy is doing nothing wrong and should be allowed to be himself and pursue whatever interests he likes, end up making common cause with the authoritarian sexists who believe the opposite. I really, really think that's a more fundamental ideological gulf than the distance between "some kids really do benefit from medical gender transition" (my view, fwiw) and "maybe they should wait until they turn 18".
Yes, one analogy is whether a parent who is simply narrowly looking out for their own child's way in the world should encourage the kid to watch their weight - because however unjust you believe it is, it is reality that thinner people have an advantage in our society.
Having a bmi between 20 and 25 isn’t only aesthetic and isn’t just a social construct. the human heart (and other organs) are not well adapted to carrying around huge amounts of fat, nor are arteries well adapted to fatty foods.
there is a range of healthy foods. this is a category imposed by nature, much lie gender. better to harmonize with nature than drive a scooter in stores, take opiates for back pain and count of angioplasty to clean your arteries
I’m sorry, this is ridiculous. The “natural” state of a human in nature is to be on the edge of starvation for your entire existence. To die before you to turn five. If you are a woman, to be pregnant pretty much your entire adult life, assuming you are getting enough food to carry a pregnancy.
Going for a jog is unnatural. Counting calories is unnatural. Heck, soap is unnatural.
Can't you just give the kid the option to take puberty blockers until they're eighteen, and then decide?
This has been a really contentious sub-chapter of the debate recently - whether puberty blockers are totally reversible or have long term effects. From where I sit, it looks like this is an open debate between MDs themselves, so I have no idea who’s right.
One of the confounders is that the criteria for getting puberty blockers are so strict that there are very few cases where people did not go on to taking hormones in adulthood (because the screening has only included those very certain of their transgenderness).
So the sample size of people who reversed is small and unrepresentative of those who would reverse if puberty blockers were widely available for teens and tweens who are uncertain.
The result is that your sample of reversers tends to include a lot of trans people who were driven to abandon transition because of transphobia, and that's obviously not going to be a sample with good outcomes.
Also, some claim that the effects are not reversible because they count "going onto hormones later on" as an effect of taking puberty blockers, which I tend to regard as being a sign that people are being transphobic and dishonest.
I have a friend who takes lithium, which has known long-term negative health effects, for his bipolar disorder. But it's better to have liver issues when you're 60 than to end up committing suicide in your 20s in a depressive fit.
fwiw, i think cross dressing is pretty harmless, precisely because it is easily reversible
otoh, a reasonable person might be loathe to marry a person who cross dresses often because it might suggest a bigger risk of wanting or needing to transition.
Most reasonable people might be loathe to marry a cross dresser because it likely increases the chances that they have other psychological oddities that might complicate life and marriage. It is, nonetheless, pretty harmless(and sometimes amusing).
Yes, the core of the issue is we are talking about doing surgeries on and injecting children with hormones in a way that permanently harms them.
The other issue is that we aren't allowed to have research on the long term effects, whether physical (cancer) or psychological, because those scientists would be canceled.
I don't think much of anyone is talking about that. As a matter of course it's not generally accepted by the medical profession to give kids hormone replacement or gender reassignment surgery. I'm not sure if this happens with minors, but my understanding is that it's extremely uncommon if it does. For kids with gender dysphoria, the standard treatment is counseling to have them explore their gender identity and sometimes puberty blockers. We don't know the full long-term effects of blockers, but it's generally believed to have much less drastic long term effects after stopping compared to say surgery or hormone replacement therapy.
I believe that what you say is true. I also can empathize with Matt (and others) that it is a legitimately worrying situation.
double plus like
The idea that we cannot research something because scientists would be canceled is patently absurd. It is absurd both because whether they would be canceled is unfalsifiable and because if nobody ever did anything that might get them canceled, the word would not even exist.
How did this get 24 Likes? This is exactly, and I mean, exactly, the same argument made against gayness thirty years ago.
Gender is an ancient category, but not one sanctified by nature. Gender is a social construct.
Different societies recognize different numbers and types of gender. Among those societies that only recognize two genders, masculine and feminine, the set of behaviors and expectations associated with each gender varies from society to society. Sex is expressed, biologically, through sex chromosomes, sex hormones, and the development of genitals. Sex is a natural phenomenon; gender is cultural.
Not to single out MY, but this article represents a double standard that really frustrates me. Dave Chappelle does a few Netflix specials with transgressive jokes because, you know, he's a comedian. So MY writes up a thoughtful article that digs up a bunch of statistics about black Americans and more-or-less concludes that progressives have to tolerate their regressive views because Democrats need their vote. And *Chappelle* is the bigot!?
If you watch Sticks and Stones and The Closer back-to-back and do not find anything Chappelle said to be directly offensive towards a group to which you belong or identify with, then you are either not American or not human.
The thing is, many people find Chappelle very, very funny (I watched Closer on an airplane and literally could not help laughing out loud). Humorless progressive scolds—exactly like the activist Christians in the 90's—are jealous of people with a sense of humor. So they get their underwear all in a knot and label Chappelle an offensive bigot because... actually I'm not really sure, because mostly they just assert that he is transphobic and the Closer proves it... somehow... and if I can't see why that is, well, then I'm transphobic too.
Lefty scolds go out of their way to be offended in the same way righty whackos seek out things to get outraged over. I guess they like the attention their rants on social media get them?
I grew up poor, rural and white, only we were all addicted to meth back then because heroin was too scarce and expensive. I lost friends to meth. I have younger family members who ruined their lives with heroin. But in Sticks and Stones Chappelle does a whole bit on the difference between poor whites on heroin and poor whites on meth. The joke was all about how to load your shotgun properly with bird shot and buck shot so you can shoot them when they break in to your house. *And I laughed my ass off.*
I think there should be a protected space for comedians who should be given wide latitude to say anything they damn well please. There's just one rule: be funny.
As a Jew, I'm thinking about how this would work for the Holocaust as a subject. Well, it has to be funny. Tough challenge! But I admire a comedian who could bring it off (see: Mel Brooks and "Springtime for Hitler"). Mind you, I can imagine some neo-Nazi comedian telling blatantly anti-Semitic Holocaust jokes to a right-wing audience and have *them* finding the jokes hilarious but that's such a fringe case it wouldn't be worth our time and attention.
Fully agree! But there is a bit of a Catch-22.
The substantive objections to Chappelle from the LGBTQ comedians on Gustavo Ariano's podcast is that Chappelle used his platform to say some things that weren't true and to promulgate outdated stereotypes and myths. But the reason he has that platform is because he is funny and part of the reason he is funny is because a lot of people believe those stereotypes and untruths. In other words, if he got up there and made a bunch of politically correct in-jokes, he wouldn't be funny.
What were the outdated stereotypes and myths?
Honestly, I did not quite get what the trans comedienne was getting at because I remembered the joke she referenced differently, but it was something to the effect that she had never seen a trans person with 'their junk hanging out of their skirt at a comedy club.' But the three (L, G and T) were in agreement that some of what he said was not correct and that he should be more careful. They also acknowledged that not all jokes hit with all audiences.
One thing that they all said was that he was really funny and that they laughed at jokes even though they did not like the substance of them. There was also some disagreement between the black comedienne and the white trans comedienne about the, uhm, intersectionality jokes I guess you'd call them?
It was a good conversation overall, much better than the boilerplate "this is just further evidence the Dave Chappelle is a transphobe" quips that drove me to watch the special in the first place.
Here is the podcast episode: https://www.latimes.com/podcasts/story/2021-10-19/the-times-podcast-dave-chappelle-special
"If you watch Sticks and Stones and The Closer back-to-back and do not find anything Chappelle said to be directly offensive towards a group to which you belong or identify with, then you are either not American or not human."
This is an interesting phrasing, because there is a sizable difference between "offensive to a group which you identify with" and "offensive to *you*". I am not in the habit of trying to determine how group gestalts would feel about things and bending my reactions to mirror them; I understand that that might be useful for a political strategist, but it strikes me as useless at best to do the same for a comedy routine. All I can say is that I did not find anything offensive to *me*.
Even if something is offensive to me, I don't feel the need to demand it be cancelled. I mean, if Chapelle were demanding the Supreme Court roll back gay marriage on a Sunday political show, I might choose not to patronize him, but to get vocal about something he does as entertainment is just dumb.
I suspect most younger people who might find him offensive just think of Dave Chapelle as some old comedian from the 2000s. When I was a kid in the eighties I was much more willing to watch a special featuring 23 year old Eddie Murphy than 60 year old Don Rickles. Eddie Murphy said some arguably homophobic stuff back then but I still came to support gay marriage.
The reason I phrased it that way is because I fully respect the right on an individual to have their own beliefs and opinions and to find things funny or offensive. What irks me is the whole performative, being offended on behalf of others thing. For example, the whole "I'm vaccinated, but I totally understand <stupid reason for refusing to get vaccinated/>" routine.
I think we're agreeing on the substance? My point is that something like "this is offensive to poor whites" can only be meaningful as saying "many poor whites will find this offensive" instead of "the group of people 'poor whites' finds this offensive". The first is a statistical claim while the latter is a category error - emotions are felt by individuals, not abstract groups, and trying to download the feelings of an approximation of a group identity is a bad idea in general.
Oh, yah, I thought we were agreeing with each other. My view is that, if your metric is "a group of people finds this offensive" then you don't understand humor. Every joke in those specials invoked stereotypical traits of some group of people and it is that transgression that makes you laugh.
People are totally free to be personally offended or to find a joke unfunny. That's indeed a personal and emotional thing. But it strikes me that the scolds are arguing that a joke can be empirically not funny to an entire group of people and I find that ridiculous... which is what I think you are saying too.
I feel like people on Both Sides refuse to account for personal taste. People who are offended insist that Chappelle is objectively not funny, and people who like him seem to take some pride in their thicker skins. It’s okay to find Chappelle deeply offensive and not funny. Not everyone has to like the same things.
This is a particularly funny instance where the activist meme "listen to black voices" very clearly means "listen to this particular highly educated black person who has the same exact political opinions as me."
Seriously though, everyone mad at Chappelle on twitter has unironically used the phrase "listen to black voices" at some point and here Chappelle is making comments that are likely to the left of the median black voter! And those views are being condemned as unacceptably bigoted. So bigoted that people are *quitting* their jobs in protest. Just hilarious to me
In recent years the mainstream news media has become swamped with advocacy journalism, the evil product of an educated class that knows who Foucault is but thinks teaching evolutionary biology is a capitalist plot. Laughing an hour with Dave Chapelle helps me feel better about the extra money that I have to pay to the Yglesiases of this world, in order to get commentary and journalism that lives up to the name.
"but thinks teaching evolutionary biology is a capitalist plot."
Is this a real problem? I know that there's some really wacky progressive creationists out there but I'm pretty sure that's a very, very small fraction of the group you're talking about.
I'm wondering if he meant to write "evolutionary psychology," because there's certainly a heavy degree of attack on that. (Can also find left-wing criticisms of evolutionary biology more broadly, but those are still pretty fringe as far as I can tell, and I'm not sure they are actually becoming more common.)
Evolutionary psychology is total junk science, though, akin to Freudianism. It’s all Just So stories.
Somewhat often on the ol' internet, I see progressive activists somewhat lamenting (jn a roundabout way, of course, though not always) that Democrats should be more stubborn and hard-nosed, like the Republicans tend to be...reflecting that old saw that "Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall apart." Sometimes it is mostly whining, but other times the person in trying to be more prescriptive. I think I read Tom Nichols tell one of them, in response to why Democrats can't afford to alienate the parts of their party they don't like, "...because you're a coalition, not a cult."
I think that's a really hard truth to absorb if you are a progressive activist advocating for policies you think are (and may, in fact, be!) morally correct. You look across the aisle, and you see the most vocal nutjobs getting cowtowed to party leadership, and you think to yourself, 'Why can't WE be those nutjobs?!?" while ignoring the hard reality that the people in your coalition put off by your policies ALWAYS vote, and the ones who really like what you have on offer...just...kind of don't? At least not at levels that would allow you to sustain the loss of the voters you don't like.
I don't think the issue is that activists don't vote....they definitely do. I think the issue is that non-activist young people, who might be a large portion of the people supportive of fringe-ier issues, don't show up to vote often enough.
>>But you have to also appreciate that "progressive activists vote and participate FAR more fervently than you, an internet commenter, do, and can't understand why you keep accusing them of not voting".<<
I don't know if this is being addressed at other Matt or myself, but it would be literally impossible to vote more often than I have since about 2008. I vote in every single election, normal year, off-year, etc., from federal contests all the way down to dogcatcher.
(Dogcatcher is not an office where I live, but you get the idea.)
You write: "I don’t think trying to arm-twist people into shunning everyone who expresses a widely-held viewpoint that trans activists disagree with is going to accomplish anything useful."
Au Contraire! This substack is useful. Having a place where you are able to write freely and persuasively (sometimes!) about a wide range of topics without being subjected to the Vox echo chamber and surrounded by people who feel "unsafe" if you sign a letter supporting free speech is a very useful thing.
Sitting next to Mr. Yglesias in an office would certainly make me feel unsafe. His prolific output would make me look shiftless by comparison, and I’d worry about losing my job.
He’s always on Twitter. You’d work for one day and have ten times his content.
We're watching 30 Rock on Netflix. It's annoying that I need to go to the library for the DVDs so we can see the 3 missing episodes. It's even more annoying that they misnumber many episodes so you can't even tell that they've deleted those episodes.
This captures my dilemma. I thought those episodes were pretty funny and on point. At the same time, I think the same of most 30 Rock episodes, so does it really matter if we lost three? I don’t know.
BLUF: Matt is wrong on the Military and Transgender people
First: I haven’t seen the closer, so I can’t comment on Chappell directly. But, I can say as a moderate that the Trans-lobby influence on politics seems to have an outsized influence on discourse.
It has gotten to the point where if I see anything about LQTBTXYX, I assume it’s not really about gay rights, but more directed at Transgender issues. Gays have largely won. Even on the conservative side, being gay doesn’t even raise eyebrows anymore. I work among a pretty right wing conservative group of blue collar workers, and gay marriage or gay jokes just aren’t really a big issue anymore.
Now, to my main point, and one that constantly annoys me.
The reason Transgender people should nott serve in the military is medical. It’s not cultural. It’s social.
People who have transitioned have to be on permanent hormones and hormone suppressors. Their hormone levels must be maintained and tested. Any other condition that requires this level of medical care automatically disqualifies you from Military Service.
If you are diabetic and must take insulin, you are disqualified. If you must take any sort of medication for depression you are disqualified. Even if all you take is medication for ADHD, you are disqualified. Blood pressure medicine, you are disqualified. Asthma, nope. The list is endless.
People argue that allowing Transgender people to serve is about increasing the pool of recruits, but this is obviously bull-pucky. If this was really the goal people cared about there are half a dozen other vastly more common exclusions that effect 1000s more people that could be debated.
The Transgender in the military issue is pure optics. It’s so that activists can say they won, feel good about themselves, and then every few months read an article about how Jane, formerly Jim, is the first Transgender airborne truck driver in the Army.
I am not saying that Transgender people can’t successfully serve and contribute in the military. What I am saying is that there is a double standard that is driven entirely by wanting to “make a point”.
I served in the USAF for 22 years. Before that I was in the Army Reserve. I think that the people in the military are the most diverse and dedicated and professional people in our country. I resent the Military being used as token organization that carves out exceptions to make cultural and social points. It causes disruption and resentment in the military, when really people should be concentrating on war fighting.
If there is a review of military enlistment standards that holistically reviewed all medical issues and what maximizes Military strength, then I would have no problem with Transgender people serving.
Ok, that’s my rant.
Now on to my solutions to all other issues.
Let’s reserve the words female and male for Gender. And then come up with other words that refer to biology.
Then what we need is a word to refer to people with wombs. I say this because some people have vaginas, but don’t have wombs or the other organs that are involved in reproduction.
This word for people with wombs should be non-gender specific, only referring to when we are talking about people who menstruate or get pregnant or require birth control.
Maybe something with the world womb in it, or at least part of it… I was thinking Wom… ite, wom… at, wom em, wom… en. That’s it. We can call people with wombs, women. Though you could be a male woman or a female woman or a non-binary woman.
Its ironic that once precise words become associated with gender, they lose their precision.
If we literally created a word… let’s say “xanin” (I don’t think that’s a real word) to refer to people with wombs in a non-gendered way, because vast majority of people with wombs are female, eventually the word would become synonymous with female/women and become gendered anyway.
Honestly unless we can talk about biological differences and gender separately, we are doomed to have the same endlessly repeating arguments.
I do have a solution for the bathroom issue. We should have a sit-down room and a stand-up room. If you can do your business while on your feet, this room has nothing but urinals. If you need to site down… then go to this room. (Though lets face it… many women wouldn’t be happy sitting one stall over from me if I had to take a dump)
Yes, I know this whole post could be taken as me not being as moderate as I am. It’s the one small issue that just gets so much more attention than it deserves as far as its applicability to most people’s daily lives.
Healthcare, housing, racism, education. Those are the issues I care about.
The problem with words for people with particular biologies is that you need more than two for medical reasons. Trans women have breasts (in spite of what a lot of people believe, they don't need implants) so they need breast cancer screenings, so they'd be with cis women for that. But they have prostates, so they need prostate cancer screenings with cis men. And they don't have cervices, so they don't need cervical cancer screenings.
Even with the uterus, it's more complicated. Trans men have a uterus but they don't menstruate. So your "people with uteruses" and "people who menstruate" categories are not the same group of people.
This is why people keep wanting to use lots of different specific categories - "people with prostates", "people with uteruses", "people with breasts", etc - for medical purposes. Because if you have a standard list for (cis) men and one for (cis) women, then trans people generally have some from column A and some from column B. So you need to specify which one you care about.
And it doesn't hurt to do the same for cis women anyway - plenty of cis women don't menstruate. If doctors have to contact everyone that menstruates because we discover some new medical risk that relates to menstruation and we need to test people, then you don't want to be bringing in everyone who has undergone menopause. You don't need to do breast cancer screenings on women who have had mastectomies.
In a medical context, fine. But one of the stupid things that our current activist class seems to have borrowed from Trotskyists is to try to normalize or require the use of academic language in everyday discourse.
This is as stupid here as it is on the topics of race and privilege.
Leave people alone, so long as they’re not advocating for lynching or harming trans folk.
No one proposes replacing "woman" with "person with a uterus" in any context other than gynaecology. I do not know what you are opposing.
A tampon is a medical device and should have an appropriate medical label, eg "for people who menstruate", or "for women and other people who menstruate".
Outside of that, not only do trans activists not want to abandon the word, they want you to use it. They want you to call trans women "women". Ideally without referencing them being trans at all - you should only refer to a trans woman as a trans woman if you would refer to a cis woman as a cis woman in the same context.
You can just talk about Laverne Cox or Nicole Maines or whoever as a "woman".
"No one proposes replacing "woman" with "person with a uterus" in any context other than gynaecology."
That is manifestly untrue.
I'm not about to troll Twitter and other fora to find every instance of it not being true, but the ACLU butchering a Ginsburg quote recently should be enough on its own to prove the point.
This phenomenon is an increasingly high-profile bit of stupidity that has infiltrated the lay world and is generating considerable pushback.
But they are proposing "pregnant people" and "birthing people" in general contexts. I don't if this is a distinction without a difference in how you're thinking about it (e.g., pregnancy is a gynaecology context). But the activist positions seem very broad to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/09/pregnant-people-gender-identity/620031/
Only in the contexts where you are talking about pregnant people generally. In contexts where you are talking about specific people, you can call them pregnant women (or occasionally pregnant men).
So ... we're deep down a pedantic well but I just don't follow this distinction either. In a specific case there's no need for a general statement - you would just use their name. As I read it -- it's a very broad activist view with a broader set of use-cases; it's a commitment to use gender-neutral language.
So all other things being equal, I would like a primary care physician who has some life experience with menstruation -- but if I were to ask a physician who uses she/her pronouns if she has such experience I think it would be seen as transphobic, even though I would be perfectly comfortable with a trans man as a Dr. provided that he wasn't on blockers before puberty. And if you are going to class every conversation about parenting, pregnancy and breast feeding as "gynecology" I think you are wiping out a lot of the identity and experience of many women. And I do think it's more complicated. We think about being a mother differently from being a father. In California legislation was enacted to allow trans people to change their children's birth certificates to reflect their current gender identity and the law does not require notice to the other parent, so a person identified as the father on a birth certificate could get that reissued to become the mother of that child. I think that is the kind of change that people feel should at least be open to discussion -- I admit that I would be annoyed to have to share the identity of mother of my children with my husband because it just feels inaccurate and doesn't reflect the reality of what it means to be a biological mother. I realize that there are lots of ways to be a mother, but I simply raise this example to say that I am person who believes in trans civil rights, and has a trans child, and puts my pronouns in my signature line etc. etc. but I don't want to just be a parent -- being a mother is pretty central to me, and I am not sure that someone who transitions well into their child's upbringing should be able to appropriate that term retroactively. And I realize that there is another case to be made, but I don't think that what I am suggesting comes from hate or fear.
I think there's a lot to that argument, yes; and I wasn't intending all of parenting to be "gynaecology".
There are a lot of complications here - like the difference between a retrospective change and a prospective one. If a trans woman and her cis wife have a child together, then calling them both "mother" is different from retrospectively making a trans woman a "mother" when she was "father" at birth. But also, continuing to call her "father" is constantly outing her as trans, which also seems wrong. Also, I have a really close friend who transitioned when her children were 8-13 and she is very definitely "mum" to them. But she's divorced and they grew up with her and not her birth mother (they're all adults now and have their own households), so uh, I'm not sure what point I was headed for other than that it definitely feels right for her to be a mother.
A final thought: the group that most anti-trans people are most concerned about are trans women, and yet the language changes that get argued about are almost never about trans women. They're usually about trans men, and sometimes they aren't about trans people at all.
For instance, "birthing parent" was suggested not as an alternative to "mother", but in a document making suggestions about maternity services for lesbian couples. It was saying that sometimes you (the healthcare provider) need to distinguish between the one who will give birth and the one that won't, and that using "mother" just for the one that will give birth was not how most lesbians want it to work. So they suggested to distinguish them with either "birthing parent" or "birthing mother", and observationally said that "birthing mother" would occasionally get a really angry response, while "birthing parent" rarely did, so the suggestion was to start with "birthing parent" and then switch to the family's preferred term if they made one clear.
In that context it seems fine, and the only people talking about any other context were the transphobes who were pulling a five-alarm fire about saying "birthing parent" instead of "mother" as if that was a trans proposal to use at all times.
Just want to agree that there may be many situations in which a trans woman is seen by her children and the other parent as a mother. I was simply pointing out that there was no room in the proposed legislation for the other parent to even weigh in, and I think that's what concerns me in these discussions is that they are often presented not as conflicting rights but simple black and white issues. I think that we should be able to concede that there are some hard questions around trans rights in a small number of areas (sports, prisons, sex segregated spaces where strangers are naked) and that trying to weigh the various claims case-by-case is not denying anyone's existence (that phrase seems to get thrown around a lot) but rather acknowledging that separating gender identity from sex means that when we then want to try sort based on the traditional binary categories it's not totally clear who should be sorted where in every situation. For example, as the mother of a trans son, I would be horrified if he were to be incarcerated in a facility for men, even as I as far less troubled by housing trans women in facilities for women.
You actually make a strong point. It makes a lot more sense now.
I don't know if you convinced me totally, since it comes down to such tiny slivers of the population that the effort involved to fight the battle might not be worth it, but honestly I am going to think harder about the debates and the specific context.
Ironically, this solves the locker room problem. We can have one for “people with vaginas” and one for “people with penises.”
“Health care, housing, racism, education.” Add an energy component (incentives to move away from fossil fuels) and I’ll sign up as an active member of that party.
As always, I really appreciate the view from someone who has served in the military. Your point on its use as a “token organization” is well taken. This is one of the things I hate about activist-driven discourse: people have no self- awareness about what they don’t know.
My preferred bathroom solution: one for people who care about it being clean, another for those who don’t.
Lol... being clean and not being clean is the natural result of my proposal. Have you ever looked at the floor under the urinal.... eww.... I'm using the sit down room.
I think you’ve flipped the most likely word combinations; female for biology snd woman for gender would be more in line with popular parlance.
Also, are you sure about the ADHD thing? I have an old high school buddy who has (diagnosed, medicated as far as I know) ADHD and left the Marines after 8 years as a captain.
You can't be on ADHD medication for two years prior to enlisting. There are exceptions, but they require waivers. Most recruiters just tell people to lie about it... which you friend probably did.
Once in the military, you just get re-diagnosed, and you are then good.
Some conditions exclude you from joining, but once in don't necessarily exclude you from continuing to serve. This of people who have lost limbs. If you have no leg, you can't joint, but their are plenty of people who continue to serve after losing a limb.
Others automatically result in separation. For instance manic depressive disorders.
I agree with the word combinations, but the "womb" thing was too good to pass up. It was more a joke to illustrate my point about how language is the whole issue.
Coming back to this for a second:
"You can't be on ADHD medication for two years prior to enlisting. There are exceptions, but they require waivers. Most recruiters just tell people to lie about it... which you friend probably did.
Once in the military, you just get re-diagnosed, and you are then good."
If this is the state of practice, then we shouldn't really be complaining that transgender medical support is an exception, we should be changing the formal rules regarding recruiting for all sorts of medical conditions.
Two things to add.
ADHD medication and access to it is no where as critical medically as transgender medical support. You have a supply of whatever, you take it, no need for blood tests or adjustment (assuming most cases).
The same isn't true of Transgender medical issues.
But, that is my whole point. I am complaining because it specifically is an exception, and they didn't adjust standards for all sorts of things.
ADHD isn't the best comparison though.
Diabetes is. If you develop diabetes which requires insulin, you are discharged... that's it.
Their are no waivers for diabetes at all.
Medical exclusions for the military are based simply on the concept that all military members should be deployable to austere remote locations for long periods of time to perform war fighting activities without any breaks and during long periods of time without access to anything other than first aid level medical care.
I would regard it as completely sensible to permit both diabetics and transgendered personnel in non-combat, non-hardship postings.
Nothing prevents these folks from having desperately needed skills to contribute, nor from feeling the same loyalty and call to serve that their combat branch counterparts do.
But you're right that there are very, very good reasons to avoid posting them in places or situations where medical support is impossible.
Hell, I doubt that the Rangers or any branch's SF would consider someone who takes medication daily. Let alone someone who needs additional support, such as bloodwork or regular physical checkups.
This is where civilians don't understand the military.
What you are advocating is a two tiered system.
Should they get the same pay? Have the same benefits, even though one group of people have more risk?
What you don't understand is the combat deployments happen on a rotation basis. You do your rotation based on the understanding that your coworker at your base will do the next rotation. What if your coworker is transgender? You now have to do all the rotations?
Besides, we have people who provide and contribute skills to the military who don't deploy. They are called DoD civilians. They work side by side with us at the the home base. Their purpose is provide continuity and support when the uniformed members do deploy.
And there are no desperately needed skills the military needs to recruit. The military does not recruit anyone based on skills, they train people to do things the military way. If I was a world class mechanic and joined the military to be a mechanic, I would still be taught how to be a mechanic.
When you see things about desperately needed skills and the military it is always about retention of people already in the military. Skills that were provided by the military.
Note: There is an argument that the Navy could do what you advocate, since except for a few specialized occupations, their isn't an expectation of deployment except to large ships like the other services. Not a strong argument, but they are the most likely to have something like that.
Pre-coffee, that sailed right over my head. Well done.