[Serious] That Trans Thread

[TaraJo]

Republicans constantly whine about the "big government", the government telling them what to do, messing with their private lives, and then they do exactly what they are accusing Democrats of doing.

This.  A million times over.  When they say they want small government, that means they want government to be small enough that it can slip into your underwear and/or uterus.

Meanwhile, oil barons are still charging us $5 a gallon for gas in the name of small, unintrusive, government.

Greater visibility has a downside.  I'm trans, but I really don't like to advertise that I'm trans.  It can be dangerous here in Oklahoma.  But..... there's a good side, too.

My kids.  They're teenagers.  My daughter went to school, made a new friend and we asked if it was a boy or a girl.  She answered very that the friend really didn't give a gender identity.  Another friend of hers has a trans sister.  Being LGBT is much more acceptable to the younger generation which gives me a lot of hope for future generations.

[Rev. Rye]

Frankly, in my experience, the politicians who actually want small government (if they exist at all) are never the ones who end up getting any power. In practice, “small government” is just a meaningless phrase they use to justify cutting any programs that actually help people. Of course, given the sort of shit that the ones who seem to really want small government would have in mind for their preferred system, I’m not sure whether it largely being a bullshit concept that they don’t actually believe in makes it worse or better.

[Fake Messiah]

Wow, JK Rowling really doesn't like trans women and finds them offensive

JK Rowling blasts Sir Keir Starmer for saying ‘trans women are women’

Her criticism came after the opposition leader said: “A woman is a female adult and, in addition to that, trans women are women, and that is not just my view — that is actually the law.”

But the author hit back writing: “I don’t think our politicians have the slightest idea how much anger is building among women from all walks of life at the attempts to threaten and intimidate them out of speaking publicly about their own rights, their own bodies and their own lives.

“Now Keir Starmer publicly misrepresents equalities law, in yet another indication that the Labour Party can no longer be counted on to defend women’s rights. But I repeat: women are organising across party lines, and their resolve and their anger are growing.”

https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/jk-...ar-AAUYLZG

[Jehanne]

Depends on how one defines a "woman".  Does

Biological sex = gender?

Generally, yes; in some cases, no.  I am a biological male (hormones with a penis); I look (from afar) as a woman, and, at close distances, am sometimes (mis)recognized as such.

And, so, what is the issue here?  Call me a "woman", a "transgender female" (my preferred term), or a shameless cross-dresser (although, I think that cross dressing is where biological men who have a male identity who simply, for whatever reason, like to wear "women's clothes", and, in my opinion, such behavior is to be, with few exceptions, praised!)

And, so, what is JK Rowling's issue?  Does she see biology and gender as being absolutely identical?  Neurological studies would seem to contradict this, at least from what I have seen.

[TaraJo]

Frankly, in my experience, the politicians who actually want small government (if they exist at all) are never the ones who end up getting any power. In practice, “small government” is just a meaningless phrase they use to justify cutting any programs that actually help people. Of course, given the sort of shit that the ones who seem to really want small government would have in mind for their preferred system, I’m not sure whether it largely being a bullshit concept that they don’t actually believe in makes it worse or better.

Agreed.  Regan was famous for saying that government was the evil in our society, but look how much he spent on military and the drug war.  Clearly, he didn't mind government involving itself in any of that.

[Rev. Rye]

The more I think about it, I'm starting to see that the one common thread in all their preferred exceptions to the rule of "Small Government" seem to revolve around inflicting some degree of force against some sort of Other, whether it's women wanting to be in charge of their bodies, "degenerates" on the LGBT spectrum looking to be seen as part of society, or non-whites doing, well, anything.

---

And, so, what is JK Rowling's issue?  Does she see biology and gender as being absolutely identical?  Neurological studies would seem to contradict this, at least from what I have seen.

From what I've been able to gather from her rants on the subject, the biggest problem is that she simply doesn't seem able to modify the whole "Biological Sex=Gender" paradigm. Admittedly, I suspect it's not an idea I'll ever to fully eradicate from my mind, but at least I can understand it intellectually and try to act accordingly. For JoJo, however, the idea has ossified in her brain and she Won't. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. About. It. Why? In her "TERF Wars" essay, she ties it to her past as a survivor of sexual and domestic abuse and how she thinks that lumping in trans folk with such women will make them feel less safe. And while I really don't like to do something like this to a survivor of abuse when talking about their abuse, all I have to say is this:



And it's wrong because, if they're in spaces for abuse survivors, they're probably far more likely to be there because they legit need to be there than out of a desire to enact some nefarious rape scheme. And she knows it, and I know she knows it because she admits as such in her essay and still comes to the conclusion that shutting the door on them is a good idea.

Of all the stories right-wing news uses to claim that there's some epidemic of men dressing up like women and invading women's spaces to sexually assault them and then claiming that they belonged there because they were trans, I can probably count the stories that checked out on my fingers. And there might be one case among that handful where the perp wasn't already a sex offender. I could go on for hours talking about how ridiculous the whole panic is, but let's get back to JoJo.

She also seems to believe that counting trans women as women somehow dilutes women's identity because women have a set of shared experiences that trans women don't have (it's weird to write out), she might explain it better than I do, but she also doesn't seem to notice that you could say the same thing about any different kind of woman, whether they're (for instance) lesbians, black women, or female Aspies. They've got their own sets of experiences that JoJo won't be able to fully share in. Doesn't mean they're not women. 

One other strange idea is she seems to think that a lot of people coming out as trans are just confused about shit (like maybe they're sexually confused and think they might be somehow better off if they switched genders) or trying to do some trendy thing without knowing that they might be making irreversible life choices (she mentions entire groups of young friends transitioning around the same time). The former's pretty self-evidently wrong to anyone who actually does a second or two of research into the subject, and while I'm not too familiar with the phoenomenon she's describing (let alone with the tragic endgame she fears could happen if their dysphoria dissipates), it seems that people detransitioning is rare and detransitioning for reasons not related to external pressures is even rarer. And I doubt that there are that many people who've transitioned without being sure this is who they think they are. Except maybe Chris-Chan, but then again, Chris-Chan considers themself the God-Empress of a dimension where fact and fiction are on the verge of merging.

For that matter, her remarks about how "woman is not a costume" seem to miss the point about what being trans even is. Dave Chappelle thinks trans women are like minstrels pretending to be black, but, the last I remembered, when those minstrels got off their stages after giving a stump speech about how George Washing Machine and Napoleon with his Bones Apart signed the Decla-Pendence of Indigestion (that's from an actual minstrel routine I saw clipped from Kyle Kallgren's new video, incidentally), they didn't try to live the lives of black people, go through what they went through, and take whatever drugs would be necessary to make their biology correspond to their idea of what they always should have been. Even the few who actually tried to help black people (like Al Jolson) knew they were white and were open about actually identifying as such.

Honestly, Sarah Z and Vaush have done their own videos dissecting her TERF manifesto and showing why her concerns are misguided.

[Disagreeable]

I despite JK Rowling for her transphobia.

A total and utter TERF on TERF island.

And you know what really annoys me? People who say "TERF" is a slur. That's like saying "Racist" or "Homophobe" or "Bigot" is a slur. It's absurd.

[Jehanne]

Transgenders, unfortunately, sometimes succumb to cancer, heart disease, and, in my case, Hostess cupcakes. I am sure that the right-wing nutcases can link all of those (except, perhaps, the latter) to the evils of crossdressing.

[Fireball]

Transgenders, unfortunately, sometimes succumb to cancer, heart disease, and, in my case, Hostess cupcakes.  I am sure that the right-wing nutcases can link all of those (except, perhaps, the latter) to the evils of crossdressing.

 Hostess cupcakes!? What is wrong with you!? 

[TaraJo]

I despite JK Rowling for her transphobia.

A total and utter TERF on TERF island.

And you know what really annoys me? People who say "TERF" is a slur. That's like saying "Racist" or "Homophobe" or "Bigot" is a slur. It's absurd.

The ironic part is that they were the ones who created the term TERF. Then the TERFs were such jerks that the term itself became an insult because being associated with their behavior was bad.