"Yes, you can reject the false, dogmatic insistences of Gender Ideology and still wish to see transgender Americans prosper and flourish and fulfill their dreams in America."
This doesn't seem accurate to me. If a transgender American's concept of fulfilling his or her "dreams in America" requires other people to affirm that a person has…
"Yes, you can reject the false, dogmatic insistences of Gender Ideology and still wish to see transgender Americans prosper and flourish and fulfill their dreams in America."
This doesn't seem accurate to me. If a transgender American's concept of fulfilling his or her "dreams in America" requires other people to affirm that a person has changed sex, or to admit a person of one sex into spaces or competitions for the other sex, that cannot be accomplished without coercion.
What is the admission of males to women's sports, bathrooms, shelters, or prisons but the same old story of the strong devouring the weak? How many incarcerated women should be sacrificed out of "courtesy" to men who believe they are or wish they were women?
I can want an individual person to flourish and fulfil his or her dreams without supporting their right to rob a bank. Similarly, I can want transgender people to flourish without accepting that Lia Thomas belongs at a women's NCAA event.
I am concerned about the rapid rise in transgender identification, especially in children, but if a person suffering from dysphoria wants to present as the opposite sex, and that makes them happy, why should I oppose that? It will be a non-issue in 95 % of all social contexts. Where I -- and I think Abigail Shrier, and JK Rowling, and some other "TERFs"--draw the line is the limited number of traditionally sex-segregated spaces, which I think should be reserved for natal women.
The idea that the ""flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.
As Jennifer Bilek points out in her amazing 11th Hour blog, "transgender" rights activism is not a grass roots movement. The trans rights activists are well funded by a dark network of nonprofits controlled by a small number of autogynephile billionaires including Stryker, Rothblatt, and Pritzker, who push this gender-bending malarky for the money, the power, their deranged sexual fantasies of giving birth to octuplets. The ultimate goal is transhumanism, and they see "transgenderism" as the easy on ramp. So if you're eager to have your great grandchildren spout feathers and gills where their genitals should be, step right on board. The "trans" train is leaving from Track 69.
At this point, I honestly don't give a rat's asterisk whether "transgender" people flourish or not. They have worn out their welcome.
Mostly, but not always easily. There is a rare (1% of the population) third category, inter-sex, also called Differences of Sex Development. It is a well-studied, established medical condition that has nothing to do with politics or metaphysical self-identification. The chromosomes may say one thing, and yet each inter-sex individual has a unique profile in terms of how their bodies developed in utero, which usually leads to a choice at some point that may require surgical and hormonal intervention. Research this topic and you’ll see what a conundrum it can be.
Thank you. I don’t claim to be an expert on this specific topic in any way, and I’m not qualified to speak on the difference between individuals who are truly intersex and those who aren’t. Are they pretending? incorrectly diagnosed? using the term for ideological or political aims? That last hypothesis seems the most plausible to me, given how pseudo-scientific trans ideology is.
Anyway, there is controversy regarding exactly how common DSD is in the human population worldwide, which may have to do with the fact that not all inter-sex people have ambiguous genitalia at birth and so may not be immediately recorded as inter-sex. I have no dog in this fight, except for wanting to know what is objectively true. As a counterweight to your statistic, here’s an article from an organization for the rights of inter-sex people which posits a significantly higher number.
This is a very interesting topic, although peripheral to the theme of the current article here on Substack. But I’d love to see a reference or two that would help me to get a clearer picture, if you care to share. Best regards.
There are still only two sexes, male and female. If someone has a disorder of sexual development, that doesn't make them "transgender," and intersex doesn't mean a person is between the two sexes. Some DSDs are very minor and easily corrected. And we certainly should not turn society into some crackpot idea of "gender inclusivity" just because one baby in 20,000 is born with a certain type of ambiguous genitalia.
I don’t disagree, but my comment was in response to the previous person who suggested deciding by chromosomes whether someone was male or female, and I was pointing out that this is almost always going to work, but there are extremely rare cases where the sex chromosomes don’t correlate with the hormone profile, morphology, presentation, etc. Thus, one might be XY but have no testosterone production and appears completely female. The absence of testosterone and lack of male secondary sex characteristics would deprive them of any male sex advantage over females in athletic competition. It is a rarity, to be sure, but it isn’t analogous to trans. It’s based on a true medical anomaly and often comes as a huge shock to a person who had defined themselves their entire life as a woman before discovering that they are XY. It has nothing to do with ideological gender inclusivity, which, again, I don’t care about and don’t even know what it means.
I went back and checked my sources and realize I erred when describing this type of XY person as producing no testosterone. In fact, they do produce testosterone, but in utero it is not recognized by the fetus (they suffer from complete androgen insensitivity syndrome — CAIS) and therefore, male genitalia do not develop. At puberty, the testosterone converts to estrogen, which the body can process, and this produces female secondary sex characteristics, including breasts, although since the person is XY they have no ovaries or uterus, so no periods. However, they do have the features, hair, skin, and body shape of females, and appear 100% female. Unlike a manufactured transgender “identity,” CAIS is based in the body. It seems to me that this is the one time when an XY person could be viewed as female for athletic purposes without having an unfair advantage or sabotaging the level playing field.
It's also possible to be born without legs or arms. Shall we ban even acknowledging the very existence of arms and legs in order to "accommodate" such people?
It's kinda funny - for marathons, they make special accommodations for like-abled people to compete against each other. There is no reason why there can't be an intersex division of olympic events. Would be boring to see the same 4-8 people enter every event, but... if the demand is there...
"The entire point is to destroy and dismantle society"
Yes, and to collect all power and moral authority into itself in the process. To oppress everyone to the point where freedom is utterly extinguished, and no one can remember what it was.
And that is what is so insidious about that ideology. It actually becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy--if you sell the idea that trans people cannot possibly be happy and may even commit suicide if they get anything less than 100% validation in every context, trans people who might otherwise have been perfectly okay with something short of that internalize that not getting access to a locker room or someone saying the word "biological male" is a catastrophe.
True. But can one be truly happy/validated without 100% access? If not, does that mean that there is inevitable, inherent conflict within the concept of Gender Ideology? If so, does that not remove it from the fairy tale realm?
Since when is the right to happiness enshrined in any document?
In modern medicine, you would think that if someone comes to a doctor and say "my brain says I need to cut off a part of my body in order to be truly happy" the doctor would say, let's work on the brain part first, before anything else. Maybe a pill is better than amputation.
'The idea that the "flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.'
You or I can say that, but if an individual transwoman believes that "flourishing" requires, for example, competing in women's sports, who are you and I to disagree?
The demands of biological men who claim to be women grow more extreme and dangerous each day. Aggressive "transgender" activists aren't just content to destroy women's sports. They are now determined to destroy women's private spaces in prisons.
California's SB 132 requires that biological men who claim to be women (regardless of whether they're on hormones, have intact penises or even present as women) be transferred into women's prisons. Once inside, these biological men, some of whom are convicted murderers, rapists, or child abusers are placed inside locked cells with female inmates, whom they can freely beat, rape, and impregnate. Since SB132 took effect last January, 300 biological men have been transferred. Conditions are so dire that prison officials now distribute condoms and information on how to secure abortions for all female inmates.
We must never sacrifice the health and safety of biological women to pacify a small subset of biological men. "Trans" ideology is an outrage that rational people must reject loudly and forcefully.
This is where shanks should come into the equation, and perhaps or definitely preemptively. Because you know that when a male prisoner says he’s a woman and wants to go be with women, it’s not because he really thinks he’s a woman, he just wants a woman or twelve. Female prisoners should really think about performing some chopadickfrommes and then maybe accidentally cutting the femoral artery as well. Word would get around.
My point is that, if we start from the premise that the self-defined flourishing of self-defined transgender persons is an important societal goal or moral imperative, there is no limiting factor other than the conflicting self-defined flourishing of regular people, women and men. And that means it's a power conflict, plain and simple.
Basically allowing men who think they are women to take over women's spaces and sports and lives is the erasing of women. Some may be truly mentally ill and could just as easily think they are a duck. Others are malevolent like the predators who want to be in women's prisons for easy victims and game the increasingly leftist nut job systems.
The same place they are when women in Iran are beaten for leaving their homes or teenage girls in Gaza are trained as suicide bombers or toddlers in Afghanistan are sold as "brides." (The geographic designations could be replaced with cities and neighborhoods in Europe, as well.)
I'm not sure where that is. Faculty seminars? Critical theory conferences?
That's a really good topic. On the other hand, the trans phenomenon we're discussing is found in the United States among, in large part, upper-middle-class white people. The type of relativism that says, "Islam is a different culture, so forced marriage and honor killing are good for *those* women," doesn't seem applicable.
Is there some other identifiable factor that would explain many feminists' choice to favor men over women, if the men claim to be women?
User01 - I agree. The ethics of decision making and cheating is that deciders can be forgiven for allowing someone with invisible or hidden “cheat skills”. But once the cheating technique becomes known, deciders are expected to act against it: leadership 101.
And consider the cost of all the drugs and surgery. Those costs are distributed through the population - in pennies-per-person, but that's true of every costs accrued by everything from smoking to motorcycling. And every medical professional who is involved in gender is one who isn't doing anything about infant mortality in communities of color or treating cancer patients. Every hospital bed taken by a gender surgery patient is one not available for a shooting victim.
They are. Idaho has to pay for some guy who was a child abuser, a child abuser!, to now become a “woman”. Hopefully it’s still on appeal because as a taxpayer in Idaho this infuriates me.
"Yes, you can reject the false, dogmatic insistences of Gender Ideology and still wish to see transgender Americans prosper and flourish and fulfill their dreams in America."
This doesn't seem accurate to me. If a transgender American's concept of fulfilling his or her "dreams in America" requires other people to affirm that a person has changed sex, or to admit a person of one sex into spaces or competitions for the other sex, that cannot be accomplished without coercion.
What is the admission of males to women's sports, bathrooms, shelters, or prisons but the same old story of the strong devouring the weak? How many incarcerated women should be sacrificed out of "courtesy" to men who believe they are or wish they were women?
Or are lying to achieve a truly horrific outcome.
Good point.
I can want an individual person to flourish and fulfil his or her dreams without supporting their right to rob a bank. Similarly, I can want transgender people to flourish without accepting that Lia Thomas belongs at a women's NCAA event.
I am concerned about the rapid rise in transgender identification, especially in children, but if a person suffering from dysphoria wants to present as the opposite sex, and that makes them happy, why should I oppose that? It will be a non-issue in 95 % of all social contexts. Where I -- and I think Abigail Shrier, and JK Rowling, and some other "TERFs"--draw the line is the limited number of traditionally sex-segregated spaces, which I think should be reserved for natal women.
The idea that the ""flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.
As Jennifer Bilek points out in her amazing 11th Hour blog, "transgender" rights activism is not a grass roots movement. The trans rights activists are well funded by a dark network of nonprofits controlled by a small number of autogynephile billionaires including Stryker, Rothblatt, and Pritzker, who push this gender-bending malarky for the money, the power, their deranged sexual fantasies of giving birth to octuplets. The ultimate goal is transhumanism, and they see "transgenderism" as the easy on ramp. So if you're eager to have your great grandchildren spout feathers and gills where their genitals should be, step right on board. The "trans" train is leaving from Track 69.
At this point, I honestly don't give a rat's asterisk whether "transgender" people flourish or not. They have worn out their welcome.
https://www.the11thhourblog.com/
100%
I am of very simple mind:
One is either XX or XY chromosomes and compete in the appropriate event as such.
Solves the problem easily...
Manetti
Science!
Mostly, but not always easily. There is a rare (1% of the population) third category, inter-sex, also called Differences of Sex Development. It is a well-studied, established medical condition that has nothing to do with politics or metaphysical self-identification. The chromosomes may say one thing, and yet each inter-sex individual has a unique profile in terms of how their bodies developed in utero, which usually leads to a choice at some point that may require surgical and hormonal intervention. Research this topic and you’ll see what a conundrum it can be.
Individuals that are TRULY intersex are .02% of the population.
Thank you. I don’t claim to be an expert on this specific topic in any way, and I’m not qualified to speak on the difference between individuals who are truly intersex and those who aren’t. Are they pretending? incorrectly diagnosed? using the term for ideological or political aims? That last hypothesis seems the most plausible to me, given how pseudo-scientific trans ideology is.
Anyway, there is controversy regarding exactly how common DSD is in the human population worldwide, which may have to do with the fact that not all inter-sex people have ambiguous genitalia at birth and so may not be immediately recorded as inter-sex. I have no dog in this fight, except for wanting to know what is objectively true. As a counterweight to your statistic, here’s an article from an organization for the rights of inter-sex people which posits a significantly higher number.
https://www.intersexequality.com/how-common-is-intersex-in-humans/
This is a very interesting topic, although peripheral to the theme of the current article here on Substack. But I’d love to see a reference or two that would help me to get a clearer picture, if you care to share. Best regards.
There are still only two sexes, male and female. If someone has a disorder of sexual development, that doesn't make them "transgender," and intersex doesn't mean a person is between the two sexes. Some DSDs are very minor and easily corrected. And we certainly should not turn society into some crackpot idea of "gender inclusivity" just because one baby in 20,000 is born with a certain type of ambiguous genitalia.
I don’t disagree, but my comment was in response to the previous person who suggested deciding by chromosomes whether someone was male or female, and I was pointing out that this is almost always going to work, but there are extremely rare cases where the sex chromosomes don’t correlate with the hormone profile, morphology, presentation, etc. Thus, one might be XY but have no testosterone production and appears completely female. The absence of testosterone and lack of male secondary sex characteristics would deprive them of any male sex advantage over females in athletic competition. It is a rarity, to be sure, but it isn’t analogous to trans. It’s based on a true medical anomaly and often comes as a huge shock to a person who had defined themselves their entire life as a woman before discovering that they are XY. It has nothing to do with ideological gender inclusivity, which, again, I don’t care about and don’t even know what it means.
I went back and checked my sources and realize I erred when describing this type of XY person as producing no testosterone. In fact, they do produce testosterone, but in utero it is not recognized by the fetus (they suffer from complete androgen insensitivity syndrome — CAIS) and therefore, male genitalia do not develop. At puberty, the testosterone converts to estrogen, which the body can process, and this produces female secondary sex characteristics, including breasts, although since the person is XY they have no ovaries or uterus, so no periods. However, they do have the features, hair, skin, and body shape of females, and appear 100% female. Unlike a manufactured transgender “identity,” CAIS is based in the body. It seems to me that this is the one time when an XY person could be viewed as female for athletic purposes without having an unfair advantage or sabotaging the level playing field.
I agree with everything you said.
1%?? Based on a friend working at 23 And Me, closer to 0.01% or less. This means the “estimates” of 0.1% to 0.5% are way off.
Intersex is truly rare and they still express one way or the other and many don’t even know it.
Yes, vanishingly rare. Not unusual to go through an entire medical career without encountering a single case
It's also possible to be born without legs or arms. Shall we ban even acknowledging the very existence of arms and legs in order to "accommodate" such people?
It's kinda funny - for marathons, they make special accommodations for like-abled people to compete against each other. There is no reason why there can't be an intersex division of olympic events. Would be boring to see the same 4-8 people enter every event, but... if the demand is there...
Well, they can't compete. Too bad. Life ain't fair.
“The idea that the ""flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.”
Not in the ideology driving this madness. The entire point in to destroy and dismantle society.
The vast majority of trans people simply want to blend in. They DON’T want to draw attention to themselves.
"The entire point is to destroy and dismantle society"
Yes, and to collect all power and moral authority into itself in the process. To oppress everyone to the point where freedom is utterly extinguished, and no one can remember what it was.
And that is what is so insidious about that ideology. It actually becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy--if you sell the idea that trans people cannot possibly be happy and may even commit suicide if they get anything less than 100% validation in every context, trans people who might otherwise have been perfectly okay with something short of that internalize that not getting access to a locker room or someone saying the word "biological male" is a catastrophe.
True. But can one be truly happy/validated without 100% access? If not, does that mean that there is inevitable, inherent conflict within the concept of Gender Ideology? If so, does that not remove it from the fairy tale realm?
There is no right to validation. In fact, I posit, thinking so is simply narcissistic.
Since when is the right to happiness enshrined in any document?
In modern medicine, you would think that if someone comes to a doctor and say "my brain says I need to cut off a part of my body in order to be truly happy" the doctor would say, let's work on the brain part first, before anything else. Maybe a pill is better than amputation.
Today's Gender Doctors are more Theodoric of York than Jonas Salk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edIi6hYpUoQ
'The idea that the "flourishing" of trans women means access to changing rooms, women's swimming events, and women's prisons is a fallacy.'
You or I can say that, but if an individual transwoman believes that "flourishing" requires, for example, competing in women's sports, who are you and I to disagree?
The demands of biological men who claim to be women grow more extreme and dangerous each day. Aggressive "transgender" activists aren't just content to destroy women's sports. They are now determined to destroy women's private spaces in prisons.
California's SB 132 requires that biological men who claim to be women (regardless of whether they're on hormones, have intact penises or even present as women) be transferred into women's prisons. Once inside, these biological men, some of whom are convicted murderers, rapists, or child abusers are placed inside locked cells with female inmates, whom they can freely beat, rape, and impregnate. Since SB132 took effect last January, 300 biological men have been transferred. Conditions are so dire that prison officials now distribute condoms and information on how to secure abortions for all female inmates.
We must never sacrifice the health and safety of biological women to pacify a small subset of biological men. "Trans" ideology is an outrage that rational people must reject loudly and forcefully.
This is where shanks should come into the equation, and perhaps or definitely preemptively. Because you know that when a male prisoner says he’s a woman and wants to go be with women, it’s not because he really thinks he’s a woman, he just wants a woman or twelve. Female prisoners should really think about performing some chopadickfrommes and then maybe accidentally cutting the femoral artery as well. Word would get around.
We're sane, rational adults, that's who.
But if a woman says no to competing with those born biologically male, who are you and I to disagree?
Indeed.
My point is that, if we start from the premise that the self-defined flourishing of self-defined transgender persons is an important societal goal or moral imperative, there is no limiting factor other than the conflicting self-defined flourishing of regular people, women and men. And that means it's a power conflict, plain and simple.
If the Equality Act is passed by the Senate, God forbid, it will mean that men's feelings will take legal precedence over women's feelings!
Basically allowing men who think they are women to take over women's spaces and sports and lives is the erasing of women. Some may be truly mentally ill and could just as easily think they are a duck. Others are malevolent like the predators who want to be in women's prisons for easy victims and game the increasingly leftist nut job systems.
Where are the so called feminists?
I'm right here—fighting this insane misogyny in every way I possibly can!
Check out WoLF, the Women's Liberation Front that fights to protect the civil rights and private spaces of women and girls. It's TERF Central Station.
https://www.womensliberationfront.org/
The answer is "they are alive and well--and being cancelled" Barri has published extensively on this topic
"Where are the so called feminists?"
The same place they are when women in Iran are beaten for leaving their homes or teenage girls in Gaza are trained as suicide bombers or toddlers in Afghanistan are sold as "brides." (The geographic designations could be replaced with cities and neighborhoods in Europe, as well.)
I'm not sure where that is. Faculty seminars? Critical theory conferences?
Cynthia...not sure either, but i could not imagine One Female voting Dem. in any election after the Afgan debacle, Sept 9th '21.
No--it's just that many, many people in the West today are cowards. There's no way to sugar-coat it.
That's a really good topic. On the other hand, the trans phenomenon we're discussing is found in the United States among, in large part, upper-middle-class white people. The type of relativism that says, "Islam is a different culture, so forced marriage and honor killing are good for *those* women," doesn't seem applicable.
Is there some other identifiable factor that would explain many feminists' choice to favor men over women, if the men claim to be women?
I think you've figured it out.
"Where are the so called feminists?"
Exactly! My constant question. They are the ultimate hypocrites.
As if they didn't disappear a long time ago when it came to Islamic misogyny.
I am a feminist and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ultimate feminist imo, is my hero!
User01 - I agree. The ethics of decision making and cheating is that deciders can be forgiven for allowing someone with invisible or hidden “cheat skills”. But once the cheating technique becomes known, deciders are expected to act against it: leadership 101.
And consider the cost of all the drugs and surgery. Those costs are distributed through the population - in pennies-per-person, but that's true of every costs accrued by everything from smoking to motorcycling. And every medical professional who is involved in gender is one who isn't doing anything about infant mortality in communities of color or treating cancer patients. Every hospital bed taken by a gender surgery patient is one not available for a shooting victim.
It's even worse than that. I understand that some prisons in the US are required to pay for inmates to have "transgender" surgery. This is nuts.
They are. Idaho has to pay for some guy who was a child abuser, a child abuser!, to now become a “woman”. Hopefully it’s still on appeal because as a taxpayer in Idaho this infuriates me.
True: courts ordered it.