I usually enjoy writing these little intros. It’s often a fun exercise to think back over the conversation, connect a few key points in my mind, and come up with something that gives you a flavour of what you’re about to read. But in this case, the quote that doubles as the title for this piece is so mind-boggling that I’m not sure where to begin. In my article, The Trouble With “Trans”, I wrote about the ever-expanding interpretation of the word “trans.”
It's important to note that most of the violence, sexual, fatal, or near-fatal that transpeople face is from their male partners. If any women are abusing transwomen partners I don't know about it but I wouldn't rule it out, and it would likely be far under the rate for cis-het women abusing cis-het males, which happens more than we think but guess what, men don't report either so we can't be sure. And lesbian domestic violence is more prevalent than we thought. So, women do abuse men, trans or otherwise, but most transpeople are getting hurt by their male partners. Which is where women are, mostly getting hurt and murdered by partners.
A month or so ago the TransTwits were trying to paint Queen Elizabeth I as 'trans' or 'nonbinary' because she displayed certain male behavioural characteristics (hard to understand why when you're the head of one of the then-most powerful countries in the world). I got a fair amount of support when I took them to task for characterizing a dead person as such when they couldn't defend themselves.
As for bathrooms, it's time we start pushing back on the third bathroom idea. There are now enough people buying into this 'identity' that it makes perfect sense. I also think it will put an end to the bathroom nonsense once enough people are on board with it. Thanks, Steve, for pointing out that male violence rates aren't notably different for trans vs cis men. I have a research paper on this somewhere in my articles collection.
And if Rob is right that you might be trans if you just 'let yourself go for five minutes', I'll keep all my old clothes and send them to you when I clean out my closet! I'm pretty girly so you can go nuts and explore your occasionally feminine side, LOL!
“It's important to note that most of the violence, sexual, fatal, or near-fatal that transpeople face is from their male partners.”
Huh, that’s a good point! So much of the data on violence against trans women is skewed by sex work or intimate partner violence. I’ve never actually tried to break down the dangers posed by the general public.
Also, thanks for the offer of the dresses!😄 I lit a scented candle last week and was a woman for a full 28 minutes!
Imagine if every facility from a gas station to a skyscraper had to add additional bathrooms or rearchitect those they already had to appease people who in reality make up 0.0015% of the population.
Meanwhile, animal species are going extinct every day, heatstroke is becoming a major cause of death, crop yields are plummeting, and democracy is dying. Bububut "gender identity."
I know. I brought this up 12 years ago with my friend whose burgeoning NB daughter was bringing this bathroom stuff home from school. I'm with ya. I know it's stupid. But I think this will call out the lie that it's "unsafe" for them, anymore than the risk of any male violence against them. Y'all are a terror to each other too :/
"As I have been saying for decades myself, transition is NOT something that should ever be made in adulthood after puberty has destroyed the body and caused severe trauma, that is insanity, oftentimes it's even too late to transition in adulthood. "
Puberty destroys the body. Ummm, yeah. I was almost tempted to respond to this fool but forebore, it would not work and would likely get me banned again for "hate speech" so I left that shit on the floor where it was shat.
There is another article today claiming that violence toward all of the members of the acronym is on the rise. Since "LQBTQIA+[this space reserved]" now means only T, it's unsurprising that someone would believe that.
Encouraging children to have their health destroyed by hormones or to be irreversibly mutilated by surgery is the real source of any backlash and it is a potent talking point for the real bigots, and almost as potent for people who are not. And since "trans" activists regard any disagreement with even their most extreme and absurd positions as "transphobia," including surgery on 13 yo girls (the article I quoted recommends surgery on five year olds), no debate is possible.
Yes, suicide rates among dysphoric teens are higher than that among all teens, but then suicide rates are also pretty high among those who transitioned and came to regret it after realizing they're actually gay, if even that, or they were just seeking an escape from misery.
And, again, the number claiming "trans" is hundreds of times the number who would actually qualify as such, it's a fad, and that throws a lot of sand into the gears of reasonable discussion.
Exactly. It is crazy to tell young, relatively ignorant children that they can choose their sex. They can't. They can sign up for a lifetime of invasive medical treatments to try to force their body to resemble that of the other sex, but that's not the same thing.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't really figure out their sexuality until they go through puberty. So, giving children puberty blockers until they "figure things out" will be counterproductive to a lot of children.
My *guess *, and it is only a guess, is that this is why most GD children eventually revert to a cis identity without treatment, but almost all children put on puberty blockers eventually progress to cross-sex hormones: the puberty blockers prevent them from understanding their body.
Again: when I was coming out in 1974 a lot of people briefly claimed to be bisexual before admitting to themselves they were gay. Now they will take refuge in "trans"; imagine a lesbian who works through her issues and comes out, abandoning her gender dysphoria pretense.
Only now her body has been mutilated and her endocrine chemistry is permanently messed up.
The guy I quoted above brags that he has helped numerous "trans children" get hormone treatments, since it's "legal in some countries." He gushes about the liberation he is enabling and the happy new life enjoyed by children who have been pharmacologically altered before puberty.
The more I learn about this trans crap, the sicker it sounds.
Got a message from someone I worked with. "There is now a young male intern at --- that wears dresses. He uses the woman's restroom. He needs an escort to make sure its empty before he goes in."
Having come of age in the early 70s, I'm continually amazed at this idea that you're in the wrong body if you you're a girl and like trucks, or you're a boy and like baking cookies. I was raised believing that you could do what you wanted, and I met plenty of people who lived their lives that way.
I think SQJ really hit the nail on the head when he said of gender "what you're talking about is a *personality."
The big danger, to me, is telling impressionable kids that certain personalities require changing your body, that certain preferences mean you're a boy or girl, and that you can change whether you're a boy or a girl. The medical interventions we're talking about are immense and lifelong. And they, to my mind, simply don't work.
I did cross-stitch for a year or so, culminating in a pattern of a cat's face that took me months of spare time but which has disappeared in one of my moves. Cross-stitch is a kind of sewing, using different colored threads to form images.
It never crossed my mind that this was a "feminine" activity or that it cast the purity of my gender into some kind of doubt. The "gender roles" that the benders are rebelling against seem like something from long ago. Much ado about less than nothing.
Steve, I'm noticing that you are having an increasingly difficult time treading lightly in the face of absurdity. I understand it, but you know...
Years ago, driving from Sedona to Phoenix we stopped at Sunset Point to use the WC. When my sister came back to the vehicle, she said that as she entered the lady's room there was a very Butch lady there and she loudly said, "Oh my God!", thinking that she had entered the men's room. AWKWARD! It was clear that the other lady knew what that was about, but I have no doubt that they both thought that they both belonged in the lady's room.
I understand that it's a painful dilemma for transexuals. Before I retired there was a big stink in our main facility because the women didn't want a trans-woman in their restroom. I don't know how it was resolved. The lady's room does not have urinals, there would be no meat peeping or flashing. They had individual stalls with private thrones. I would think that since it wasn't the shower room at the gym that privacy could exist, and it could have been resolved with the trans-lady using the lady's room but I'm not a woman so it's not up to me. It's not like the trans-woman would want to risk being fired and worse for an impropriety.
While I've stood at a urinal next to a kathoey in Thailand, even though he was spectacularly passing until there we stood, he was not transexual. A transitioning, live as a woman, transexual would probably prefer a stall to an unabashed hiked skirt at a urinal.
The theme throughout what I've just written is honesty. That seems to be the impasse with Rob.
"Steve, I'm noticing that you are having an increasingly difficult time treading lightly in the face of absurdity. I understand it, but you know."
😁Well spotted! I was, for unrelated reasons, in a particularly grumpy mood when I had this conversation. I noticed that I was more antagonistic than usual as I revisitied it. But yeah, I must admit, it's also just hard being civil with people who are so outright dishonest. As you say, honesty is the impasse. And dishonesty is one of the few thngs thatmakes me angry.
People like Rob (who aren't even transgender) are making matters worse for *everybody*. Trans people, women, anybody who has even the slightest degree of intellectual honesty. Every time they trot out these ridiculous arguments, they push more people away from any semblance of support for trans people.
I honestly wish we could arrive at a world where trans women could stand at a urinal with their skirt hiked up unabashed. I very strongly suspect we won't. the dishonesty of trans people demanding to be seen as something they're not, while it doesn't usually make me angry, does make me sad.
Trans women are male. Without surgery, they have penises. That makes them different to females and therefore inelligble to be treated identically to them. It also means the violence they might face in male spaces is not a female problem. As you say, if women decide to accomodate trans women un some spaces, great. It's the demands that I find so hard to stomach.
1) the extent to which people who should know better have bought into this stuff. People with graduate degrees who will state "a trans woman is a woman" even if the conversion is mere minutes old
2) the extremity. Even the most supportive people who disagree on one tiny point are indistinguishable from people who say they should all be shot. When you repeated that "a trans woman is a man" Rob immediately went back to that tired-ass "transphobic" shit.
3) the fakes. This is a ploy for a lot of people to get an extra scoop of special attention. I can understand the dysphoric being ten times what medical statistics proclaim, but not a hundred times and certainly not the thousand we are getting now. It's a fad.
4) the damage. The activists don't give a goddamn about women, about children, about sexual minorities, they are not helping anyone and they do a lot of harm. A lot of teenagers are going to live out their later lives without pieces they were born with or with permanent endocrine disorders from puberty blockers and worse. And they don't care.
Edit: I enjoy seeing your exasperation at people like Rob. I really feel like sometimes your equanimity toward plain old liars edges into role-playing and that "god damn asinine" response gave me a smile.
True, but I don’t think chromosomes are really the issue here. If the definition of a trans woman was somebody who has had gender reassignment surgery, I think I’d make the case for them to be treated as women in all cases except sport.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I don’t see the argument for excluding trans women from women’s spaces if they’ve been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, no longer have a penis, and are living “as women.” Their chromosomes don’t seem very important at that point.
I didn't say anything about bathrooms or other uh spaces. I was talking about biological definition and nothing more.
A man who has been through surgical transition and presents as female in every way would be out of place in a men's bathroom and by that stage there is no reason for him to be in one.
And it's never been the genuinely dysphoric I have a problem with. It's the other 99% who claim "trans" just for attention.
If our species survives the next few decades well enough for the continuing advance of science and technology then the day may come when we can transfer a brain, or maybe even just a mind, into a cloned body of the other gender or something more exotic, and they we won't have these discussions anymore.
In my mind Rob lost any right to be taken seriously when he asserted that "a trans woman IS a woman." The brazen denial of indisputable biological fact is a threshold that we should not pass.
"But the idea that if I were to say right now "I'm a woman, please use she/her pronouns," you believe I should be treated legally as if I'm a woman, is just so god damn asinine."
This is the core of the matter, right there. A man struggles into a dress, mutters "I'm a woman now," and fifteen seconds later walks into a women's bathroom and starts masturbating into the sink. Yeah we should respect "her gender identity."
You already know my thought on the idea that someone can remove the trans prefix and claim honesty or rationality.
I don't know the specifics of that bathroom situation at work but I can't imagine someone getting themself fired for beating off in the lady's room sink.
People like Rob make it hard to believe that anyone's labelled trans is even slightly rational.
"People like Rob make it hard to believe that anyone's labelled trans is even slightly rational."
I touched on this above, but yes, this is especially why I find Rob and his ilk so nfuriating. He *isn't* trans. He's just a useful idiot virtue-signalling his way to making trans people seem more unreasonable than they are.
I posted a video of a girl who had a meltdown at work and left in tears because a coworker refused to "they" her. When she yelled, "my pronouns are they! them!" I wanted to slap her face so bad.
There are real transgendered people. A few, 5000 by the stats, 50,000 being generous. They deserve support and help. The fakes deserve our scorn.
I was reading one article from a person (I forget which way the transition went) who suffered headaches and stomach pain from childhood, through the 30s, and within two weeks of transition had a whole new outlook, symptoms gone. This sounded believable. The "they" people don't.
"And lastly, trans women make up about 0.7% of the population"
That is about three orders of magnitude greater than the number coming from peer-reviewed medical criteria.
"nobody is pretending to be trans."
Based on the vast gap between the criteria cited above and self-reports, I would say that pretense outnumbers reality by a factor of several hundred. What better way to get special attention than to demand everyone listen to endless references to "my gender identity?" The real dysphorics I've known never even mentioned it.
One of the things that fascinates me about what's happening now is the sense I have that people like Rob think this is all something new: that this generation has invented/discovered gender bending and that they need to tutor everyone else regarding these issues. Of course, they're not curious at all. If they were, they'd learn that in fact these debates were going on forty, fifty years ago. In lesbian spaces, among other places. Many conversation about pronouns, the idea of indeterminate gender, etc. Furious debates. Earnest sharing. The history of gender throughout the world. Third-spirit, etc. Many books were written. History. Speculative fiction. Theory. But, there was no internet. It was a demi-monde, and these books and conversations were not readily available to the general public. So perhaps the current ignorance is understandable, if not excusable.
I never felt that the word "woman" was particularly descriptive of my experience, although I was and am a feminist. For years I would regularly be challenged when I used women's restrooms in public, because I was an androgynous lesbian who looked more like a young gay man than a woman, (through no particular effort on my part). I also got hit on and harassed, of course, which led to some amusing encounters. Nothing says "cognitive dissonance" like having a redneck in a pickup truck yell "faggot" and throw a beer can at you, then getting hit on by a woman who thinks you're a man, when you're a young lesbian making your way in the world. Anyway, I have followed with alarmed interest the devolution of trans ideology, especially as it seems to be eating up young women--who otherwise would probably be lesbians--at an alarming rate.
I am relatively new to the Trans conversation. When I first started engaging, I felt the need to be thoughtful, balanced and empathetic. Three months in and I've lost all patience. It's like finally having enough with the 5 year old who wont stop poking their kid brother. As I was reading through the exchange, all I could feel as I read Rob's comments is 'enough with this nonsense already!' Sheesh - this clearly has nothing to do with the civil rights of a marginalized group - stop wasting our time already.
Fanatics of any stripe, be they gun nuts, cryptocurrency nuts, or "trans" activists are indistinguishably unreasonable. The latter have Medium at their beck and call.
I agree about fanatics but there is a difference in firmly held beliefs and fanaticism. The trouble is that the dividing line is not firmly defined and we sometimes see people who have a different worldview as fanatics.
Even firmly held beliefs should succumb to strong factual evidence. A fanatic is someone who won't listen to evidence at all.
Take Laffer economics; a perfect record of failure, except for a tiny margin around 70% taxation (which we haven't had since Eisenhower) and a small decrease actually stimulates, yet universities are loaded with tenured economists teaching this rubbish because the billionaires like it.
This Rob person says that a man who says who identifies as a woman is a woman and anyone disagreeing is "transphobic." That's seven miles down the road from stupid. That isn't a strongly held belief.
"But the idea that if I were to say right now "I'm a woman, please use she/her pronouns," you believe I should be treated legally as if I'm a woman, is just so god damn asinine. I cannot believe that in the year of our lord 2022, there are people seriously suggesting this."
Not only are there people "suggesting" it, it is currently the LAW in most "blue" states in the US. And the Democrats in the US Congress are unanimously in favor of the "Equality Act", which would make this the law in the US nationwide.
“But sexual aggression is a male problem, not a gender identity problem.”
Right. In the current fad of blurring traditional definitions, I like the phrase ‘people with testosterone.’ It’s ironic to the point of being amusing to see these ‘people with testosterone’ so aggressively advocating for blurring the normal boundaries between themselves and women--- women’s spaces, locker rooms, women’s sports. It’s such obvious testosterone behavior.
Simple, but not easy. Practical implementation can be complex and difficult. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to achieve those goals. "Just" implies too much simplicity.
The only real way to accomplish this, and I am not trying to be insensitive or elitist, is to prevent the occurrence of men with an IQ below 90. Almost all violent crimes are committed by men (regardless of race or sexual orientation) with an IQ between 75 and 90.
As for why this correlation exists, the most regarded explanation is:
> A final causal explanation links IQ to crime through school performance. Less intelligent students do less well in school, which results in academic frustration. This frustration, in turn, weakens their attachment and commitment to schooling, and a weakened bond to school, as per social control theory, allows for more criminal behavior (Hirschi and Hindelang). This school-performance hypothesis has received strong support from empirical studies, and it is probably the most widely accepted explanation of the IQ-crime correlation (Moffitt).
"Almost all," you say. Does the article have actual statistics?
Crime particularly the violent sort is mostly done by men between the ages of 15 and 35. Past that age and certainly by 45 they have spent so much of their lives in prison that they no longer feel they're smarter than other people who have jobs instead of stealing.
They also tend to be of a certain physical type; square-shouldered and flat-bellied.
But these are little more than stereotypes; smart people, older people, obese people commit crimes too.
I feel compelled to add that the world has less and less use for people with low IQs. A lot of work would have been automated by now without the need to keep the sub-100 people employed.
>>> Phew! Masterful job, Steve. Your patience is astounding, to me anyway. A few quotes, with a few of my comments preceded by ">>>".
Rob: "And now people more and more people are saying to embrace the parts of you that don’t conform to the old views of gender. You can be a feminine man, because masculinity isn’t what makes you a man. And conversely femininity doesn’t make you a woman. That’s why trans women and feminine men aren’t the same genders. That why people say there are many genders out there. You have to find the gender (or genders) that works for you. You don’t have to even label it, but it’s good to know yourself."
>>> I find this to be completely the truth. But Rob implies that trans women and feminine men aren't the same *sex.* Or that's what he's *trying* to imply. Which is factually incorrect.
Rob: "One definition of being Trans is to 'transcend the gender binary,' so thinking in terms of sex or male/female doesn’t work. You have to be open to the idea that there are other possibilities out there. It might confusing or even scary, but most social progress is like that at first."
>>> This paragraph following the above? Now *this* is just plain laughable. Transcends? Really? And, yeah, thinking in terms of sex or male/female doesn't work if You're talking about what a person's about. But it works in other ways. A *lotta* other ways. And I find it laughable that *regressing* back to the 50s can be viewed as "progress." Pretty sneaky how that works.
Rob: "There is no proper definition of "man" anymore because there are no specific characteristics that belong to only men."
>>> XX chromosomes. And mebbe some small number of intersex people. The exception that proves the rule.
You, Steve: "It can only be accepted through cult-like, unthinking devotion. It can only be defended with dishonesty and emotional blackmail. Because its sole purpose is to cultivate the lie that sex is meaningless."
>>> There it is. The unadulterated and unforgiveable Truth that means You *hafta* be called a transphobe, Steve. Otherwise...
It's important to note that most of the violence, sexual, fatal, or near-fatal that transpeople face is from their male partners. If any women are abusing transwomen partners I don't know about it but I wouldn't rule it out, and it would likely be far under the rate for cis-het women abusing cis-het males, which happens more than we think but guess what, men don't report either so we can't be sure. And lesbian domestic violence is more prevalent than we thought. So, women do abuse men, trans or otherwise, but most transpeople are getting hurt by their male partners. Which is where women are, mostly getting hurt and murdered by partners.
A month or so ago the TransTwits were trying to paint Queen Elizabeth I as 'trans' or 'nonbinary' because she displayed certain male behavioural characteristics (hard to understand why when you're the head of one of the then-most powerful countries in the world). I got a fair amount of support when I took them to task for characterizing a dead person as such when they couldn't defend themselves.
As for bathrooms, it's time we start pushing back on the third bathroom idea. There are now enough people buying into this 'identity' that it makes perfect sense. I also think it will put an end to the bathroom nonsense once enough people are on board with it. Thanks, Steve, for pointing out that male violence rates aren't notably different for trans vs cis men. I have a research paper on this somewhere in my articles collection.
And if Rob is right that you might be trans if you just 'let yourself go for five minutes', I'll keep all my old clothes and send them to you when I clean out my closet! I'm pretty girly so you can go nuts and explore your occasionally feminine side, LOL!
“It's important to note that most of the violence, sexual, fatal, or near-fatal that transpeople face is from their male partners.”
Huh, that’s a good point! So much of the data on violence against trans women is skewed by sex work or intimate partner violence. I’ve never actually tried to break down the dangers posed by the general public.
Also, thanks for the offer of the dresses!😄 I lit a scented candle last week and was a woman for a full 28 minutes!
Ohhhh, now I hate you! You're *prettier* than me! Bitch! :)
Imagine if every facility from a gas station to a skyscraper had to add additional bathrooms or rearchitect those they already had to appease people who in reality make up 0.0015% of the population.
Meanwhile, animal species are going extinct every day, heatstroke is becoming a major cause of death, crop yields are plummeting, and democracy is dying. Bububut "gender identity."
I know. I brought this up 12 years ago with my friend whose burgeoning NB daughter was bringing this bathroom stuff home from school. I'm with ya. I know it's stupid. But I think this will call out the lie that it's "unsafe" for them, anymore than the risk of any male violence against them. Y'all are a terror to each other too :/
"I get on with all kinds of blokes"
— Bob Rusk "Frenzy" (Hitchcock, 1972)
From a response on Medium:
"As I have been saying for decades myself, transition is NOT something that should ever be made in adulthood after puberty has destroyed the body and caused severe trauma, that is insanity, oftentimes it's even too late to transition in adulthood. "
Puberty destroys the body. Ummm, yeah. I was almost tempted to respond to this fool but forebore, it would not work and would likely get me banned again for "hate speech" so I left that shit on the floor where it was shat.
There is another article today claiming that violence toward all of the members of the acronym is on the rise. Since "LQBTQIA+[this space reserved]" now means only T, it's unsurprising that someone would believe that.
Encouraging children to have their health destroyed by hormones or to be irreversibly mutilated by surgery is the real source of any backlash and it is a potent talking point for the real bigots, and almost as potent for people who are not. And since "trans" activists regard any disagreement with even their most extreme and absurd positions as "transphobia," including surgery on 13 yo girls (the article I quoted recommends surgery on five year olds), no debate is possible.
Yes, suicide rates among dysphoric teens are higher than that among all teens, but then suicide rates are also pretty high among those who transitioned and came to regret it after realizing they're actually gay, if even that, or they were just seeking an escape from misery.
And, again, the number claiming "trans" is hundreds of times the number who would actually qualify as such, it's a fad, and that throws a lot of sand into the gears of reasonable discussion.
Exactly. It is crazy to tell young, relatively ignorant children that they can choose their sex. They can't. They can sign up for a lifetime of invasive medical treatments to try to force their body to resemble that of the other sex, but that's not the same thing.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't really figure out their sexuality until they go through puberty. So, giving children puberty blockers until they "figure things out" will be counterproductive to a lot of children.
My *guess *, and it is only a guess, is that this is why most GD children eventually revert to a cis identity without treatment, but almost all children put on puberty blockers eventually progress to cross-sex hormones: the puberty blockers prevent them from understanding their body.
Again: when I was coming out in 1974 a lot of people briefly claimed to be bisexual before admitting to themselves they were gay. Now they will take refuge in "trans"; imagine a lesbian who works through her issues and comes out, abandoning her gender dysphoria pretense.
Only now her body has been mutilated and her endocrine chemistry is permanently messed up.
The guy I quoted above brags that he has helped numerous "trans children" get hormone treatments, since it's "legal in some countries." He gushes about the liberation he is enabling and the happy new life enjoyed by children who have been pharmacologically altered before puberty.
The more I learn about this trans crap, the sicker it sounds.
Got a message from someone I worked with. "There is now a young male intern at --- that wears dresses. He uses the woman's restroom. He needs an escort to make sure its empty before he goes in."
So that's how they are solving the dilemma.
Having come of age in the early 70s, I'm continually amazed at this idea that you're in the wrong body if you you're a girl and like trucks, or you're a boy and like baking cookies. I was raised believing that you could do what you wanted, and I met plenty of people who lived their lives that way.
I think SQJ really hit the nail on the head when he said of gender "what you're talking about is a *personality."
The big danger, to me, is telling impressionable kids that certain personalities require changing your body, that certain preferences mean you're a boy or girl, and that you can change whether you're a boy or a girl. The medical interventions we're talking about are immense and lifelong. And they, to my mind, simply don't work.
I did cross-stitch for a year or so, culminating in a pattern of a cat's face that took me months of spare time but which has disappeared in one of my moves. Cross-stitch is a kind of sewing, using different colored threads to form images.
It never crossed my mind that this was a "feminine" activity or that it cast the purity of my gender into some kind of doubt. The "gender roles" that the benders are rebelling against seem like something from long ago. Much ado about less than nothing.
Steve, I'm noticing that you are having an increasingly difficult time treading lightly in the face of absurdity. I understand it, but you know...
Years ago, driving from Sedona to Phoenix we stopped at Sunset Point to use the WC. When my sister came back to the vehicle, she said that as she entered the lady's room there was a very Butch lady there and she loudly said, "Oh my God!", thinking that she had entered the men's room. AWKWARD! It was clear that the other lady knew what that was about, but I have no doubt that they both thought that they both belonged in the lady's room.
I understand that it's a painful dilemma for transexuals. Before I retired there was a big stink in our main facility because the women didn't want a trans-woman in their restroom. I don't know how it was resolved. The lady's room does not have urinals, there would be no meat peeping or flashing. They had individual stalls with private thrones. I would think that since it wasn't the shower room at the gym that privacy could exist, and it could have been resolved with the trans-lady using the lady's room but I'm not a woman so it's not up to me. It's not like the trans-woman would want to risk being fired and worse for an impropriety.
While I've stood at a urinal next to a kathoey in Thailand, even though he was spectacularly passing until there we stood, he was not transexual. A transitioning, live as a woman, transexual would probably prefer a stall to an unabashed hiked skirt at a urinal.
The theme throughout what I've just written is honesty. That seems to be the impasse with Rob.
"Steve, I'm noticing that you are having an increasingly difficult time treading lightly in the face of absurdity. I understand it, but you know."
😁Well spotted! I was, for unrelated reasons, in a particularly grumpy mood when I had this conversation. I noticed that I was more antagonistic than usual as I revisitied it. But yeah, I must admit, it's also just hard being civil with people who are so outright dishonest. As you say, honesty is the impasse. And dishonesty is one of the few thngs thatmakes me angry.
People like Rob (who aren't even transgender) are making matters worse for *everybody*. Trans people, women, anybody who has even the slightest degree of intellectual honesty. Every time they trot out these ridiculous arguments, they push more people away from any semblance of support for trans people.
I honestly wish we could arrive at a world where trans women could stand at a urinal with their skirt hiked up unabashed. I very strongly suspect we won't. the dishonesty of trans people demanding to be seen as something they're not, while it doesn't usually make me angry, does make me sad.
Trans women are male. Without surgery, they have penises. That makes them different to females and therefore inelligble to be treated identically to them. It also means the violence they might face in male spaces is not a female problem. As you say, if women decide to accomodate trans women un some spaces, great. It's the demands that I find so hard to stomach.
For me it's more than just the dishonesty.
1) the extent to which people who should know better have bought into this stuff. People with graduate degrees who will state "a trans woman is a woman" even if the conversion is mere minutes old
2) the extremity. Even the most supportive people who disagree on one tiny point are indistinguishable from people who say they should all be shot. When you repeated that "a trans woman is a man" Rob immediately went back to that tired-ass "transphobic" shit.
3) the fakes. This is a ploy for a lot of people to get an extra scoop of special attention. I can understand the dysphoric being ten times what medical statistics proclaim, but not a hundred times and certainly not the thousand we are getting now. It's a fad.
4) the damage. The activists don't give a goddamn about women, about children, about sexual minorities, they are not helping anyone and they do a lot of harm. A lot of teenagers are going to live out their later lives without pieces they were born with or with permanent endocrine disorders from puberty blockers and worse. And they don't care.
Edit: I enjoy seeing your exasperation at people like Rob. I really feel like sometimes your equanimity toward plain old liars edges into role-playing and that "god damn asinine" response gave me a smile.
"𝘐 𝘦𝘯𝘫𝘰𝘺 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘙𝘰𝘣. 𝘐 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘭𝘥 𝘭𝘪𝘢𝘳𝘴 𝘦𝘥𝘨𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘰𝘭𝘦-𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 "𝘨𝘰𝘥 𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘯 𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘦" 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘢 𝘴𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘦."
Me too, but his voice is too valuable to see it erased from Medium. I'd really hate to see that happen.
Given that he writes so often about "trans" I am astonished that Roger (he/him) hasn't sent him an email yet.
It just happened with one of my Medium favorites. This article about the phenonium is well stated.
https://medium.com/lucid-nightmare/i-finally-got-my-first-warning-after-four-years-of-writing-ba3ae33eadc7
And even after a radical orchidectomy (taking off everything) which is the treatment for testicular cancer, they still have XY chromosomes.
True, but I don’t think chromosomes are really the issue here. If the definition of a trans woman was somebody who has had gender reassignment surgery, I think I’d make the case for them to be treated as women in all cases except sport.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I don’t see the argument for excluding trans women from women’s spaces if they’ve been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, no longer have a penis, and are living “as women.” Their chromosomes don’t seem very important at that point.
I didn't say anything about bathrooms or other uh spaces. I was talking about biological definition and nothing more.
A man who has been through surgical transition and presents as female in every way would be out of place in a men's bathroom and by that stage there is no reason for him to be in one.
And it's never been the genuinely dysphoric I have a problem with. It's the other 99% who claim "trans" just for attention.
If our species survives the next few decades well enough for the continuing advance of science and technology then the day may come when we can transfer a brain, or maybe even just a mind, into a cloned body of the other gender or something more exotic, and they we won't have these discussions anymore.
In my mind Rob lost any right to be taken seriously when he asserted that "a trans woman IS a woman." The brazen denial of indisputable biological fact is a threshold that we should not pass.
"But the idea that if I were to say right now "I'm a woman, please use she/her pronouns," you believe I should be treated legally as if I'm a woman, is just so god damn asinine."
This is the core of the matter, right there. A man struggles into a dress, mutters "I'm a woman now," and fifteen seconds later walks into a women's bathroom and starts masturbating into the sink. Yeah we should respect "her gender identity."
Rubbish.
You already know my thought on the idea that someone can remove the trans prefix and claim honesty or rationality.
I don't know the specifics of that bathroom situation at work but I can't imagine someone getting themself fired for beating off in the lady's room sink.
People like Rob make it hard to believe that anyone's labelled trans is even slightly rational.
"People like Rob make it hard to believe that anyone's labelled trans is even slightly rational."
I touched on this above, but yes, this is especially why I find Rob and his ilk so nfuriating. He *isn't* trans. He's just a useful idiot virtue-signalling his way to making trans people seem more unreasonable than they are.
I posted a video of a girl who had a meltdown at work and left in tears because a coworker refused to "they" her. When she yelled, "my pronouns are they! them!" I wanted to slap her face so bad.
There are real transgendered people. A few, 5000 by the stats, 50,000 being generous. They deserve support and help. The fakes deserve our scorn.
I was reading one article from a person (I forget which way the transition went) who suffered headaches and stomach pain from childhood, through the 30s, and within two weeks of transition had a whole new outlook, symptoms gone. This sounded believable. The "they" people don't.
Rob says
"And lastly, trans women make up about 0.7% of the population"
That is about three orders of magnitude greater than the number coming from peer-reviewed medical criteria.
"nobody is pretending to be trans."
Based on the vast gap between the criteria cited above and self-reports, I would say that pretense outnumbers reality by a factor of several hundred. What better way to get special attention than to demand everyone listen to endless references to "my gender identity?" The real dysphorics I've known never even mentioned it.
One of the things that fascinates me about what's happening now is the sense I have that people like Rob think this is all something new: that this generation has invented/discovered gender bending and that they need to tutor everyone else regarding these issues. Of course, they're not curious at all. If they were, they'd learn that in fact these debates were going on forty, fifty years ago. In lesbian spaces, among other places. Many conversation about pronouns, the idea of indeterminate gender, etc. Furious debates. Earnest sharing. The history of gender throughout the world. Third-spirit, etc. Many books were written. History. Speculative fiction. Theory. But, there was no internet. It was a demi-monde, and these books and conversations were not readily available to the general public. So perhaps the current ignorance is understandable, if not excusable.
I never felt that the word "woman" was particularly descriptive of my experience, although I was and am a feminist. For years I would regularly be challenged when I used women's restrooms in public, because I was an androgynous lesbian who looked more like a young gay man than a woman, (through no particular effort on my part). I also got hit on and harassed, of course, which led to some amusing encounters. Nothing says "cognitive dissonance" like having a redneck in a pickup truck yell "faggot" and throw a beer can at you, then getting hit on by a woman who thinks you're a man, when you're a young lesbian making your way in the world. Anyway, I have followed with alarmed interest the devolution of trans ideology, especially as it seems to be eating up young women--who otherwise would probably be lesbians--at an alarming rate.
I am relatively new to the Trans conversation. When I first started engaging, I felt the need to be thoughtful, balanced and empathetic. Three months in and I've lost all patience. It's like finally having enough with the 5 year old who wont stop poking their kid brother. As I was reading through the exchange, all I could feel as I read Rob's comments is 'enough with this nonsense already!' Sheesh - this clearly has nothing to do with the civil rights of a marginalized group - stop wasting our time already.
Fanatics of any stripe, be they gun nuts, cryptocurrency nuts, or "trans" activists are indistinguishably unreasonable. The latter have Medium at their beck and call.
I agree about fanatics but there is a difference in firmly held beliefs and fanaticism. The trouble is that the dividing line is not firmly defined and we sometimes see people who have a different worldview as fanatics.
Even firmly held beliefs should succumb to strong factual evidence. A fanatic is someone who won't listen to evidence at all.
Take Laffer economics; a perfect record of failure, except for a tiny margin around 70% taxation (which we haven't had since Eisenhower) and a small decrease actually stimulates, yet universities are loaded with tenured economists teaching this rubbish because the billionaires like it.
This Rob person says that a man who says who identifies as a woman is a woman and anyone disagreeing is "transphobic." That's seven miles down the road from stupid. That isn't a strongly held belief.
"But the idea that if I were to say right now "I'm a woman, please use she/her pronouns," you believe I should be treated legally as if I'm a woman, is just so god damn asinine. I cannot believe that in the year of our lord 2022, there are people seriously suggesting this."
Not only are there people "suggesting" it, it is currently the LAW in most "blue" states in the US. And the Democrats in the US Congress are unanimously in favor of the "Equality Act", which would make this the law in the US nationwide.
“But sexual aggression is a male problem, not a gender identity problem.”
Right. In the current fad of blurring traditional definitions, I like the phrase ‘people with testosterone.’ It’s ironic to the point of being amusing to see these ‘people with testosterone’ so aggressively advocating for blurring the normal boundaries between themselves and women--- women’s spaces, locker rooms, women’s sports. It’s such obvious testosterone behavior.
What's so astonishing is how many 'people with estrogen' go along with it, to their own detriment.
I didn't have enough patience for this bloke. You are a saint, as you did. I am just tired of this shit.
"reduce male aggression"
Wow! How did that solution escape everyone? It's so simple. Here:
Deficit? Just reduce spending!
Climate change? Just reduce emissions!
War? Just stop fighting!
Inflation? Just stop raising prices! (Tried by Zimbabwe https://web.archive.org/web/20100215090109/http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/world/africa/07zimbabwe.html?ex=1328504400&en=5709ec03b6b62b0d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss)
Fuel prices too high? Just charge less!
Simple, but not easy. Practical implementation can be complex and difficult. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to achieve those goals. "Just" implies too much simplicity.
> reduce male aggression
The only real way to accomplish this, and I am not trying to be insensitive or elitist, is to prevent the occurrence of men with an IQ below 90. Almost all violent crimes are committed by men (regardless of race or sexual orientation) with an IQ between 75 and 90.
As for why this correlation exists, the most regarded explanation is:
> A final causal explanation links IQ to crime through school performance. Less intelligent students do less well in school, which results in academic frustration. This frustration, in turn, weakens their attachment and commitment to schooling, and a weakened bond to school, as per social control theory, allows for more criminal behavior (Hirschi and Hindelang). This school-performance hypothesis has received strong support from empirical studies, and it is probably the most widely accepted explanation of the IQ-crime correlation (Moffitt).
"Intelligence and Crime ." Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice. . Retrieved August 25, 2022 from Encyclopedia.com: [https://www.encyclopedia.com/law/legal-and-political-magazines/intelligence-and-crime](https://www.encyclopedia.com/law/legal-and-political-magazines/intelligence-and-crime)
"Almost all," you say. Does the article have actual statistics?
Crime particularly the violent sort is mostly done by men between the ages of 15 and 35. Past that age and certainly by 45 they have spent so much of their lives in prison that they no longer feel they're smarter than other people who have jobs instead of stealing.
They also tend to be of a certain physical type; square-shouldered and flat-bellied.
But these are little more than stereotypes; smart people, older people, obese people commit crimes too.
I feel compelled to add that the world has less and less use for people with low IQs. A lot of work would have been automated by now without the need to keep the sub-100 people employed.
The article is chock full of stats.
If the Rob I was communicating with on Medium is the same Rob as you spoke with, and they do write alike, he is one extremely sick dude.
"And what's wrong with elective castration? People don't need balls to live. If it's a "fad" then let it run it's course."
He says that dysphoria is not a prerequisite for being "trans."
>>> Phew! Masterful job, Steve. Your patience is astounding, to me anyway. A few quotes, with a few of my comments preceded by ">>>".
Rob: "And now people more and more people are saying to embrace the parts of you that don’t conform to the old views of gender. You can be a feminine man, because masculinity isn’t what makes you a man. And conversely femininity doesn’t make you a woman. That’s why trans women and feminine men aren’t the same genders. That why people say there are many genders out there. You have to find the gender (or genders) that works for you. You don’t have to even label it, but it’s good to know yourself."
>>> I find this to be completely the truth. But Rob implies that trans women and feminine men aren't the same *sex.* Or that's what he's *trying* to imply. Which is factually incorrect.
Rob: "One definition of being Trans is to 'transcend the gender binary,' so thinking in terms of sex or male/female doesn’t work. You have to be open to the idea that there are other possibilities out there. It might confusing or even scary, but most social progress is like that at first."
>>> This paragraph following the above? Now *this* is just plain laughable. Transcends? Really? And, yeah, thinking in terms of sex or male/female doesn't work if You're talking about what a person's about. But it works in other ways. A *lotta* other ways. And I find it laughable that *regressing* back to the 50s can be viewed as "progress." Pretty sneaky how that works.
Rob: "There is no proper definition of "man" anymore because there are no specific characteristics that belong to only men."
>>> XX chromosomes. And mebbe some small number of intersex people. The exception that proves the rule.
You, Steve: "It can only be accepted through cult-like, unthinking devotion. It can only be defended with dishonesty and emotional blackmail. Because its sole purpose is to cultivate the lie that sex is meaningless."
>>> There it is. The unadulterated and unforgiveable Truth that means You *hafta* be called a transphobe, Steve. Otherwise...