If indeed all those things are already done, and they are not going to be reversed, then sports may not be such an important issue for trans kids. But there are still trans kids who don't eat and drink until after the school is over, because they are afraid of using the school's restrooms. There are many who are constantly harassed for how they dress and behave, not just by other kids, but also by teachers and other school staffs. Many states are introducing bills to restrict their lives totally unrelated to sports. There are even attempts to ban any discussion of LGBTQ issues at school.
So if you are a trans kid, you are told you cannot play sports with your friends because you have "unfair advantage." But then if you try to get puberty blocker so that you don't develop that "unfair advantage" then you are told you are too young to make that decision. In the meantime, the state legislature is trying to prevent you from using the girls' restroom beacuse you are a "sexual predator." But then you are told your parents pushed you into transition because they were afarid you were gay. If you try to form a student organization to share your experience with other LGBTQ students, you are told that's against the school policy or even the state law. How would that all make sense to you? I would feel like other people are trying to push me into a closet and make me invisible to them.
There are many states that are trying to ban trans girls from sports, but is there any state that is trying to make it less restrictive? There are state that currently do not require medical transitioning, but those policies (or non-policies) have been in place for some time, and I don't see any movement to make it LESS resrtictive anywhere.
My wife's cousin is the department head at a major university in the United States. Easily ranked in the top 10 - perhaps a small notch below a Johns Hopkins. Of course he has peer review work - lots of it - medicine requires it, lots of it. And he is the department chairman. I am hesitant to state his name because his position on this generates a lot of flak. It is also not the main focus of his research. And while he supports transgender people, and supports transition in the right circumstances, his lifelong peer reviewed endocrinology work reflects that there are consequences to medical intervention. Even if you don't agree with him - and frankly you don't seem all that tolerant of divergent views - i can't see how his focus on the externalities that obtain with medical intervention with young people is a negative. We want people to be healthy and happy, and to the extent that some opt for medical intervention when there are underlying mental issues that have not been addressed, well, I think that is a valid point to be made. Your who cares statement reflects a certain amount of arrogance. I have educational credentials few have (including likely you). I could easily say who cares what you say. But it doesn't advance any understanding. What do you think of Abigail Shrier's book? I suspect it might invoke an emotional response from you. A logical one would be desirable, however.
Absurd to think a trans female needs to play sports against biological girls in order to not kill themselves.
An argument that NOBODY made. It is amazing how obtuse you folks are when you have to distort what someone says and then argue against your distortion. WEAK.
"In the interview with Smerconish, Hogshead-Makar expressed concern that Penn swimmers with misgivings about Thomas competing in women’s events were not allowed to share those thoughts publicly. “Whenever the swimmers have expressed any discomfort or any second thoughts or want to talk about it with leaders at Penn or with their coaches, they are shut down right away. There’s no room for them to say anything. They have been told that if they speak out, they will never get a job again, that corporate America will Google their name and say, ‘Transphobe, we don’t want that.’ They’ve been told that they can’t do anything,” Hogshead-Makar said."
My wife's cousin is the department head at a major university in the United States. Easily ranked in the top 10 - perhaps a small notch below a Johns Hopkins. Of course he has peer review work - lots of it - medicine requires it, lots of it. And he is the department chairman. I am hesitant to state his name because his position on this generates a lot of flak. It is also not the main focus of his research. And while he supports transgender people, and supports transition in the right circumstances, his lifelong peer reviewed endocrinology work reflects that there are consequences to medical intervention. Even if you don't agree with him - and frankly you don't seem all that tolerant of divergent views - i can't see how his focus on the externalities that obtain with medical intervention with young people is a negative. We want people to be healthy and happy, and to the extent that some opt for medical intervention when there are underlying mental issues that have not been addressed, well, I think that is a valid point to be made. Your who cares statement reflects a certain amount of arrogance. I have educational credentials few have (including likely you). I could easily say who cares what you say. But it doesn't advance any understanding. What do you think of Abigail Shrier's book? I suspect it might invoke an emotional response from you. A logical one would be desirable, however.
I have not read Shrier's book, and after reading this review on Psychology Today, I am not sure if it is worth reading.
I wonder why you mentioned a book by an opinion journalist, as opposed to a scholarly work such as Lisa Littman's article. Does Shrier's book cover more than Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria identified in Littman's article? Is there any scientific insight in Shrier's book that I cannot find in Littman's work?
Speaking of which, what do you think of this study?
Although emergence of gender dysphoria at puberty is long established, a distinct pathway of rapid onset gender dysphoria was recently hypothesized based on parental data. Using adolescent clinical data, we tested a series of...
Regarding people who regret medical transitions, I have a few questions.
-- Are they more prevalent among male-to-female or female-to-male transitions? Or are they roughly the same frequency?
-- At what age do they first experience gender dysphoria?
-- When did they start social transitioning? How many years between the first realization of gender dysphoria and the start of social transitioning.
-- When did they start medical transitioning? How many years between the first realization of gender dysphoria and the start of medical transitioning? How many years of the start of social transitioning and the start of medical transitioning?
-- What kind of counseling and psychological evaluations did they receive before the social transitioning, and how often did they receive those evaluations? The same about before the medical transitioning.
-- Did they start social transitioning in total isolation from other youths with gender dysphoria? Or did they have any "peer group" that went through the same process?
-- Did they have any mental health issues unrelated their gender dysphoria prior to expressing their dysphoria? How about mental health issues related to their gender dysphoria? (*)
Are any of the variables above related to the likelihood that a person regrets medical transitioning? Or are they totally unrelated?
Have they got their brains scanned? Is there any relationship between the persistence of gender dysphoria and the brain structure?
* If someone had mental health problem unrelated to gender dysphoria, then it's not any surprised that transitioning does not solve that problem. If the mental health problem is related to gender dysphoria, that could be a different matter. (It could solve part of the problem, to the extent it is related to the gender dysphoria.)
It may be true that "woke" originated in AAVE, but it is now used to describe exactly the quasi-religious viewpoint I described in my response to you. You can use a motte and bailey rhetorical tactic and continually change the meaning of the term woke to suit the purposes of your argument, but nearly everybody knows what I'm talking about, even if they don't know the philosophical and academic roots of the phenomenon.
The "woke" worldview can be traced to several sources, including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, postmodernism, and those who drew upon and synthesized these schools of thought, most notably the theory of intersectionality (see Angela Davis, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Derrick Bell, Kimberlie Crenshaw, and even the Combahee River Collective, a group of black lesbian feminists who started meeting in 1974 and published a famous political manifesto in 1977: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/). The stuff most pertinent to the trans issue comes from postmodernism, including work by Gayle Rubin, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler.
Interestingly enough, that worldview rejects objectivity--the idea that we ought to separate the morality and social standing of the person making a knowledge claim from the veracity of the claim--and replaces it with standpoint-based knowledge. Standpoint epistemology claims that oppressed people have special access to the truth. To be fair, the Combahee River Collective was an explicitly political group and did not make claims about how to generate knoweldge about the world. However, many of the people listed above are scholars who are making such claims, and nearly all of them reject the scientific method and the norm of objectivity. They view the world as a conflict between oppressor and oppressed (critical theory) and belive that the former created the social world to institutionalize their power and keep the oppressed class down. This is combined with postmodernism's rejection of truth claims, all of which they view as an attempt to capture and/or maintain power.
Therefore, we end up with this absurd claim that the sex binary is an effect of power and not a real thing that exists outside of human frameworks of meaning. This assertion is religious, not empirical, and it is precisely this kind of thinking that people are talking about when they use the term "woke." Critical theory and postmodernism both require one to adopt ideological tenets without question; they are self-referential bodies of thought that do not permit critique from outside.
Your response to me, which is to dismiss my claims by associating them with whites and conservatives while defending woke by associating it with African Americans is very much in line with standpoint epistemology. More to the point, I did not use "woke" in a pejorative way. I used it in a descriptive way to point out to you that your viewpoints are not grounded in shared reality; they derive in part from the religion-like truth claims inherent in wokeness.
Woke is spiritual not empirical. You think your opponents are stupid and blind to the truth. In fact, many have different assumptions about the nature of reality and how to generate knowledge about reality. You're also mistaken that the people who are critical of the woke worldview or do not share it are composed almostly entirely of whites and conservatives. Nearly the entire scientific community until about 10 seconds ago rejected the woke worldview. It was debated in academic circles throughout the 90s, pretty much dismissed outside of the humanities from about 2000-2010, then exploded in a bastardized version in the general public around the time social media use became widespread.
Part of your problem, and you do have a problem, is that you are labeling people who are advocating for transgender rights as “woke” and then saying “woke” is a religion as if to say it is as substantial as a belief in Santa Claus. Science of course should play a role here but you write as if a respect for science cannot co-exist with respect for transgender rights. It is true that those who wanted to abolish slavery could have been labeled “woke” and dismissed as believers in a new and fake religion. You want to label people to control people. Some people are more complex than to exist with your easing concocted labels which are often used to describe a fringe element of “wackos.” It is too easy to play that game. Do better.
I just wrote a detailed response with an explanation of what I meant by wokeness, which BTW, is based a pretty good understanding of the intellectual roots of this phenomenon, and this is what you come back at me with? Not to mention your conflation of religious belief with belief in Santa Claus? If you don't know the difference between the two, I'll explain: Human beings tell their children myths about Santa Claus to make Christmas a magical experience. Therefore we know that Santa Claus isn't real. Nobody knows the nature of existence and the meaning of life (the issues that are at the core of religion).
You're also lugging out the old, "Do better!" What you fail to realize is that critics of postmodern/critical theory views of gender are not anti-trans rights. We are against a worldview that rejects science and shared reality in favor of a faith-like system that substitutes pedantic nonsense for sound reasoning and considered judgement.
My guess is that you do not truly grasp how radical and anti-reality the underpinnings of the dominant strand of trans activism is today. I've literally had people tell me that transwomen cannot possibly have male advantage because they're women and/or female. People making such assertions are either playing language games for political reasons or so hopped up on dogma that they cannot think properly.
The fact that many women do not want to compromise safety and fairness to accommodate a subset of biological males does not make them hateful or akin to proponents of slavery. People always cart out the racism charge, and it's nonsense. Ask yourself who is being called a heretic today. The Ivy-educated upperclass professional smugly explaining, "Trans women are women. FULL STOP," and waging a Twitter campaign to ruin the lives of dissenters, or the everyday people who understand how babies are made?
Last but not least, I absolutely support the contention that science can coexist with support for transgender rights; however, I would caution everybody to consider whether "transgender" (the West's current way of making sense of a host of bodily dissatisfactions) is leading to the most effective and ethical social policies. RunRagged has posted repeatedly on these threads explaining the unfair advantages of allowing males at any age in female sports categories.
In addition to the sports stuff, most people would be shocked at just how flimsy the research base is on the safety of medical gender "affirmation" and its effectiveness for treating gender dysphoria. The puberty blocker/cross-sex hormones protocol for adolescents, known as the Dutch Protocol, is based on a single study with carefully screened participants. Cross-sex hormones at any age greatly increase the risk of cardiovascular accidents and cancer. Aesthetic surgeries for trans-identified people have a high complication rate.
Life as a woman would be much easier right now if I thought the only threats to our rights and safety were religious conservatives. In fact, we have it coming from all sides: The Equality Act effectivly making it impossible to argue for sex-based rights, proposed changes to Title IX that do the same, and now the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade (the original Roe decision might be bad legal reasoning, but I definitely support a federal guarantee of abortion access). Formal and secular religious zealots seem hellbent on imposing their will on everybody else, particularly women. It's misogyny, and it's obscene.
Jennifer Harvey writes how her child coming out as non-binary not only expanded their world in a major way and granted them a grounded sense of self, but motivated Harvey to work toward creating a space for trans and non-bina...
It’s a long diatribe written about how their child who identifies as a they (but has testicles) was discriminated against (likely because they weren’t allowed to play on the girl’s team). But at the end, they were just fine because they were allowed to participate in the coed league. That league has always been open to everybody, because there is an expectation among the participants and parents that those are the rules. What is not okay is for an individual with testicles who has undergone puberty intact to participate in a competitive female only league.
This is not complicated (and I am a liberal for the most part)
It is complete common sense - women who used to be men have an advantage over biological women. Sport is meant to be fair - it doesn't matter if 1 or 200 have an advantage.
And the trans kid who takes a spot on the team from little Suzy - are we to assume Suzy is committing suicide because she can no longer play sports
The evidence that there is an advantage is beyond a shadow of doubt - how many of us watched semenya or niyonsaba or the swimmer from the ncaa or the weightlifter in the olympics. It isn't rocket science, 'they' developed in the presence of testerone which confers advantages throughout your life in terms of muscle mass
This is not complicated (and I am a liberal for the most part)
It is complete common sense - women who used to be men have an advantage over biological women. Sport is meant to be fair - it doesn't matter if 1 or 200 have an advantage.
And the trans kid who takes a spot on the team from little Suzy - are we to assume Suzy is committing suicide because she can no longer play sports
The evidence that there is an advantage is beyond a shadow of doubt - how many of us watched semenya or niyonsaba or the swimmer from the ncaa or the weightlifter in the olympics. It isn't rocket science, 'they' developed in the presence of testerone which confers advantages throughout your life in terms of muscle mass
Common sense - often missing from the left
Comm
Ricci Tres, 29, a Los Angeles-based skateboarder and father of three who now identifies as a trans woman would beg to differ. Tres recently made headlines for beating out a 13 year-old girl to take first place in NYC skateboarding contest meant for female skaters.
Formerly known as Richard Batres, Tres was a 2nd Class Petty Officer and machinist in the US Navy and married to the woman who bore the couple's three children before deciding two years ago to start taking hormones "to become a woman" after "feeling 'guilty' about crossdressing" for years.
Excerpts from today's Daily Mail:
Last weekend, Tres took first prize at The Boardr competition in New York City, an open competition in which kids and adults can compete against each other. Shiloh Catori, 13, won the women's competition last year followed by 16-year-old Christine Cottam and 10-year-old Juri Ikura.
This year, Shiloh was second to Tres. Many say it's unfair that Tres, who lived 27 years as a man before coming out as trans, should be able to compete against the young girls and that it goes 'beyond the pale'.
But [Tres] sees no issue with it, telling DailyMail.com the sport is not as physically demanding as others like swimming or running, and that age and gender 'don't count'.
'I’m not going to go and be easy on them because they’re kids,' [Tres] said in an interview on Tuesday.
Tres served four years in the Navy as an aviation machinist, working aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
[Tres] spoke fondly of [the the time the skater spent] in the military, describing it as 'awesome'...
While in the Navy, [Tres] married now ex-wife Hannah. The pair have three children; Greyson, seven, Jonah, five, and Penelope, two.
[Tres] hopes to one day be allowed to compete [in women's skateboarding] in the Olympics, and wants to continue winning smaller, local competitions to boost her world ranking and be able to qualify.
Currently, The Boardr ranks [Tres] as 839th in the world [amongst women and girls]. Shiloh, the 13-year-old [Tres] beat over the weekend, is 133rd.
'I’m just skateboarding to be happy. I just want to be happy,' [Tres] said.
Who the hell cares? The guy sounds like a complete douche bag (assuming the story is true as it sounds like something from the Onion) but who really cares? Nobody cares about this skateboarding nonsense. Obviously.