Mate, over the years you've hurled all sorts of slurs at me in your efforts to portray anyone who disagrees with you and the sexist gender identity ideology that you espouse as ill-informed eejits and right-wing bigots. You've shown a special penchant for slagging off and sneering at women who speak up for female people and female-only sports, spaces and services in particular, calling us hateful and old-fashioned. But this is the first time to my knowledge you've called me "a cultural imperialist."
Please provide evidence of posts I have made on LRC that back up your claim that I am a "cultural imperialist."
Your post on urinals in women's bathrooms. You forgot about that?
Huh? A urinal, according to Oxford, is "a bowl or other receptacle, typically attached to a wall in a public restroom, into which men may urinate."
Dictionary dot com says a urinal is a "a flushable wall fixture, as in a public lavatory, used by men for urinating."
Wikipedia, a source you often cite, says
A urinal (US: /ˈjʊərənəl/, UK: /jʊəˈraɪnəl/)[1] is a sanitary plumbing fixture for urination only. Urinals are often provided in public toilets for male users in Western countries (less so in Muslim countries). They are usually used in a standing position. Urinals can be with manual flushing, automatic flushing, or without flushing, as is the case for waterless urinals. They can be arranged as single sanitary fixtures (with or without privacy walls) or in a trough design without privacy walls. Urinals designed for females ("female urinals") also exist but are rare. It is possible for females to use male urinals with a female urination device.
On the thread you are referring to, I said women's restrooms are not customarily equipped with urinals. In fact, I said they never are. This is due to the distinctive nature of female urinary anatomy that means girls and women pee differently to the way boys and men do, and the fact that women and girls use toilet facilities outside the home to deal with bodily processes males don't have to contend with, such as menstruation, miscarriage and the bleeding that usually goes on for weeks or months following childbirth.
In response, you attemped to make the case that because a couple of designers have come up with protypes for female urinals, some concert providers in Asia provide what are called female urinals, and a plumbing supply company has published some glosssy photos of a mocked-up fancy women's restooom with a bank of urinals along one wall, it means urinals are commonplace in women's rooms around the world.
Please point to the cultures where it's customary for women's restrooms to have urinals.
I've personally used toilet facilities meant for females in many parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Central and South America. Whilst some of the facilities I've used and seen provide essentially just holes in the ground or the floor that require squatting, none have have had the wall-mounted devices known as urinals.
Please name the places in the world where you have personally come across women's restrooms equipped with urinals.
How on earth is it "cultural imperialism" to point out that girls and women around the world don't use urinals because we pee differently to males? How is it "cultural imperialism" to note that girls and women all around the globe have anatomy and bodily processes which urinals aren't designed to handle?
This post was edited 6 minutes after it was posted.
Your last sentence shows your inability to critically distance yourself from the cultural waters in which you swim. "Trans" is a relatively recent, Western way of understanding behavior; one can look back only a few decades to see how the category has shifted over time. Trans was once defined as a biological or psychological phenomenon that led some people to become transsexual (this meant that one had surgery); now it is a mystical category describing any person who experiences discomfort with one's sexed body or wants to peform affectations associated with the other sex for pleasure. At the extremes, trans parts ways with sex entirely and becomes an ideology through which hyperliberal ideas (individuals are disembodied subjectivities) combine with technology in an effort to transcent the human body. Human beings are males and females who reproduce through sexual intercourse; transhumans sculpt the body into whatever the mind desires, even escaping the body entirely to live entirely in the digital world.
Here you are calling people ignorant and genocidal, and yet you are operating from a deeply presentist and ethnocentic viewpoint--one that advocates for radical interventions into the minds and bodies of minors, preventing them from undergoing normal developmental processes, sterilizing them before they have the capacity to weigh risks and benefits and understand themselves.
Wow things change over time? Amazing
Right. And...follow me here. That means that "trans" is not an enduring type of person about which some people harbor genocidal impulses.
Just like the trans phenomenon itself. GD is correct, I’m afraid.
There have been attempts to claim that modern-day transgenderism is part of a long tradition of gender-ROLE-bending in history, such as the Native American personages found in some tribes’ histories who we now refer to in English as “two-spirits,” but it is in fact a modern, Europe- and America-centric phenomenon that arises only from modern, European and American ways of thinking, particularly in the academy. It is also undeniable that its spread and current trendiness is not just traceable to the influence of academic “queer theory” but actually a long time GOAL of that philosophy. Queer theory has long sought to, in its own words, “complicate” gender and sexuality categories and get people to see them as bendable or even breakable. Ostensibly their reason for doing this was to help get people to accept sexual minorities, though in my opinion the queer theorists got so used to “complicating” categories that they’ve forgotten why they do it in the first place. (I think this is rapidly becoming true of self-described “antiracists” but that’s another issue).
Queer theorists are activist philosophers, though: they aren’t looking at what IS true through experimentation like a scientist, but seeking to MAKE true what they believe is to their advantage. They are postmodernists, after all, so the very foundation of their philosophy is the idea that there is no “truth” per se but that power, influence, and ways of communicating “make” truth. They believe if power dynamics and/or centers of influence and/or communicative media change in time, what we take as “truth” can also change in time, even in the absence of any evidence for the new truth, or any discovery of new measurable phenomena of the sort that would cause a scientifically-minded person change his or her mind.
And how did you "learn" all that? Not from anything written by "Western" authors, right?
What you and GD are doing is the classical definition of cultural imperialism. You are interpreting non-Western world through the culturally biased Western lenses.
When she made that claim on the board before, I asked her for evidence. She pointed to Brazilian drag performers who did not have female self-identity. That's like saying there is no trans woman in today's Australia because Courtney Act self-identifies as a male.
When I asked her opinion about this 80 yr old trans woman from Japan who has been known to the public for over half a century, she had no response.
In some "Western" people's mind, the reality exists only when it is recorded in a Western language (or even worse, only in English). Everything else is irrelevant to them. I have encountered this attitude from so many people in so many different settings.
And the big irony is that GD called another poster "ethnocentric."
It's pointless arguing with you because you repeatedly misinterpret others, sometimes intentionally. I never once referred to Brazilian drag performers. The Travesti are not "drag performers." They are not trans, nor is the "trans woman from Japan." Different cultures have different ways of understanding gender nonconformity, and many of those identified by Westerners as "trans" are homosexuals enacting homosexuality in the ways expected by their local culture. The idea that people could "self-identify as female" is ridiculous to most people from most cultures throughout human history. Ethnocentricity is the thing causing you to mistake all of these different phenomena as "trans."
As Yifffie McGee wrote above, current Western ideas about trans come from queer theory, which is itself downstream of French postmodernist philosophy. We can also pepper in some social constructionists like John Money and others involved in sex reassignment over the past 100 years. Rejecting the ideas of French postmodernists and their American students does not make somebody a bigot or ignorant.
Thanks for this heartbreaking article. I knew about the Kentucky bill, but didn't know the story of Karen and Henry Berg.
Using procedural trickery to prevent a vote on her amendment that would require teachers to address students as their parents request -- whether cis or trans -- shows that the bill has nothing to do with protecting students from alleged transgroomer teachers and everything to do with ostracizing trans children. As Karen Berg said, “Your vote ‘yes’ on this bill means one of two things. Either you believe that trans children do not exist or you believe that trans children do not deserve to exist.”
The former belief can only come from ignorance. The latter can only come from hatred.
Your last sentence shows your inability to critically distance yourself from the cultural waters in which you swim. "Trans" is a relatively recent, Western way of understanding behavior; one can look back only a few decades to see how the category has shifted over time. Trans was once defined as a biological or psychological phenomenon that led some people to become transsexual (this meant that one had surgery); now it is a mystical category describing any person who experiences discomfort with one's sexed body or wants to peform affectations associated with the other sex for pleasure. At the extremes, trans parts ways with sex entirely and becomes an ideology through which hyperliberal ideas (individuals are disembodied subjectivities) combine with technology in an effort to transcent the human body. Human beings are males and females who reproduce through sexual intercourse; transhumans sculpt the body into whatever the mind desires, even escaping the body entirely to live entirely in the digital world.
Here you are calling people ignorant and genocidal, and yet you are operating from a deeply presentist and ethnocentic viewpoint--one that advocates for radical interventions into the minds and bodies of minors, preventing them from undergoing normal developmental processes, sterilizing them before they have the capacity to weigh risks and benefits and understand themselves.
So which is it? Do you believe trans people don't exist, or don't deserve to exist? ("All people who believe they are trans are deluded because queer theory and decadent West" isn't really a different option here.)
This and your follow-up posts are quite a bit of blah, blah, blah to evade the fact that while the scientific understanding of being transgender has expanded over the last century or so (with a major setback due to the Nazis targeting Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexology in their first round of book burnings), trans people have been present in societies throughout the world and history -- at, broadly speaking, a similar rate to that in Western society today.
I don't give a damn about queer theory, or the other far-left political baggage some trans activists want to impose as articles of faith. Trans people exist and cannot be defined, wished, electro-shocked, aversion-therapized, or talked out of being what they are --- though maybe into being stuck and miserable, in many cases to the point of contemplating or committing suicide.
For those who need it, the only thing anyone has found that works is transition, which is currently good enough to allow a lot of them to live happy and relatively healthy lives. It will only get better as long as science, freedom, and kindness prevail over religious fundamentalism, tyranny, and hatred.
(In other words, it's not the least bit guaranteed.)
So which is it? Do you believe trans people don't exist, or don't deserve to exist? ("All people who believe they are trans are deluded because queer theory and decadent West" isn't really a different option here.)
This and your follow-up posts are quite a bit of blah, blah, blah to evade the fact that while the scientific understanding of being transgender has expanded over the last century or so (with a major setback due to the Nazis targeting Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexology in their first round of book burnings), trans people have been present in societies throughout the world and history -- at, broadly speaking, a similar rate to that in Western society today.
I don't give a damn about queer theory, or the other far-left political baggage some trans activists want to impose as articles of faith. Trans people exist and cannot be defined, wished, electro-shocked, aversion-therapized, or talked out of being what they are --- though maybe into being stuck and miserable, in many cases to the point of contemplating or committing suicide.
For those who need it, the only thing anyone has found that works is transition, which is currently good enough to allow a lot of them to live happy and relatively healthy lives. It will only get better as long as science, freedom, and kindness prevail over religious fundamentalism, tyranny, and hatred.
(In other words, it's not the least bit guaranteed.)
Thank you. What a bunch of irrelevant “academy” bs from GD et al. I posted the story about Henry Berg and I’ll post the profiles below published yesterday. Where exactly does “queer theory” inform any of their stories? We are dealing with actual human beings who deserve autonomy, dignity and respect as the starting point. If that right to autonomy pushes up against or infringes on others, then yes, this needs to be resolved, but with the utmost care.
And how did you "learn" all that? Not from anything written by "Western" authors, right?
What you and GD are doing is the classical definition of cultural imperialism. You are interpreting non-Western world through the culturally biased Western lenses.
When she made that claim on the board before, I asked her for evidence. She pointed to Brazilian drag performers who did not have female self-identity. That's like saying there is no trans woman in today's Australia because Courtney Act self-identifies as a male.
When I asked her opinion about this 80 yr old trans woman from Japan who has been known to the public for over half a century, she had no response.
In some "Western" people's mind, the reality exists only when it is recorded in a Western language (or even worse, only in English). Everything else is irrelevant to them. I have encountered this attitude from so many people in so many different settings.
And the big irony is that GD called another poster "ethnocentric."
Of course I learned about queer theory from Western authors, they were the ones who invented it. Go read their texts from the mid-20th century on, and you’ll see the foundations of the modern “truths” about gender that trans activists like to push. Finding one Asian person who “has been known to the public” since around the time queer theory arises doesn’t prove anything. There was also a (German? Dutch?) guy in the early 1900s who had surgery after surgery to make his body female, and finally died when his body rejected the womb a surgeon implanted. There is also a MtF person who had some media notoriety after WW2 when “she” married a male soldier, and there’s a British FtM from I believe the late 19th/early 20th century who took enough hormones to grow a beard but had to cultivate a misogynist reputation to explain why “he” never married (it was actually so the bride would not pull down the husband’s pants and find a vagina). These pre-queer-theory people show that there probably is a rare condition now called gender dysphoria. They do NOT prove queer theory hasn’t made a purposeful intervention into the thinking of modernity that (1) has huge numbers of people now convinced they’re trans, (has even huger numbers of people confused about what gender is and isn’t, and (3) was not made from disinterested truth-seeking but rather from an activist interest.
Not that rare of a condition. Lynn Conway, better known for her contributions to microchip engineering, estimated over 20 years ago that the prevalence of trans people who needed full hormonal and surgical transition (although, certainly at that time, not all of them would be able to obtain it) was at least 1 in 500, and that a broader definition of transgender people could easily be 1% or more of the population. She did this based on counts of transgender genital surgeries in the US, similar estimates from other countries, estimates of prevalence of third-gender minorities in other cultures, and anecdotal evidence about the prevalence of crossdressers and how many of them seemed to go on to transition. All of these gave estimates in the same general range. At the time, the scientific consensus was that transsexuality was very rare, 1 in 30,000 for trans women and 1 in 100,000 for trans men.
Surprise, surprise: the engineer (also, one of the first several hundred trans women to transition in the US) who bothered to get the data and do a little math was right.
if anyone is interested. Trigger warning for the sort of people who post trigger warnings: she wrote this 20+ years ago and therefore inevitably uses dated language. Deal with it or don't, but don't whine about it.
National Public Radio reported that “there is limited scientific research” on the topic of whether biological males have an inherent advantage over females in sports.
World Athletics Council said they prioritize fairness and the integrity of female track and field competitions, rather than inclusion. The ruling could hinder several Olympic medalists.
So which is it? Do you believe trans people don't exist, or don't deserve to exist? ("All people who believe they are trans are deluded because queer theory and decadent West" isn't really a different option here.)
This and your follow-up posts are quite a bit of blah, blah, blah to evade the fact that while the scientific understanding of being transgender has expanded over the last century or so (with a major setback due to the Nazis targeting Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexology in their first round of book burnings), trans people have been present in societies throughout the world and history -- at, broadly speaking, a similar rate to that in Western society today.
I don't give a damn about queer theory, or the other far-left political baggage some trans activists want to impose as articles of faith. Trans people exist and cannot be defined, wished, electro-shocked, aversion-therapized, or talked out of being what they are --- though maybe into being stuck and miserable, in many cases to the point of contemplating or committing suicide.
For those who need it, the only thing anyone has found that works is transition, which is currently good enough to allow a lot of them to live happy and relatively healthy lives. It will only get better as long as science, freedom, and kindness prevail over religious fundamentalism, tyranny, and hatred.
(In other words, it's not the least bit guaranteed.)
Thank you. What a bunch of irrelevant “academy” bs from GD et al. I posted the story about Henry Berg and I’ll post the profiles below published yesterday. Where exactly does “queer theory” inform any of their stories? We are dealing with actual human beings who deserve autonomy, dignity and respect as the starting point. If that right to autonomy pushes up against or infringes on others, then yes, this needs to be resolved, but with the utmost care.
The stuff I've posted is what people are being taught in professional programs. It's not irrelevant "academy" BS. Queer theory is watered down form is the dominant ideology underlying trans today. Nobody with knowledge about the issue thinks otherwise; they only differ in whether they accept or reject its core rationale.
Of course I learned about queer theory from Western authors, they were the ones who invented it. Go read their texts from the mid-20th century on, and you’ll see the foundations of the modern “truths” about gender that trans activists like to push. Finding one Asian person who “has been known to the public” since around the time queer theory arises doesn’t prove anything. There was also a (German? Dutch?) guy in the early 1900s who had surgery after surgery to make his body female, and finally died when his body rejected the womb a surgeon implanted. There is also a MtF person who had some media notoriety after WW2 when “she” married a male soldier, and there’s a British FtM from I believe the late 19th/early 20th century who took enough hormones to grow a beard but had to cultivate a misogynist reputation to explain why “he” never married (it was actually so the bride would not pull down the husband’s pants and find a vagina). These pre-queer-theory people show that there probably is a rare condition now called gender dysphoria. They do NOT prove queer theory hasn’t made a purposeful intervention into the thinking of modernity that (1) has huge numbers of people now convinced they’re trans, (has even huger numbers of people confused about what gender is and isn’t, and (3) was not made from disinterested truth-seeking but rather from an activist interest.
Not that rare of a condition. Lynn Conway, better known for her contributions to microchip engineering, estimated over 20 years ago that the prevalence of trans people who needed full hormonal and surgical transition (although, certainly at that time, not all of them would be able to obtain it) was at least 1 in 500, and that a broader definition of transgender people could easily be 1% or more of the population. She did this based on counts of transgender genital surgeries in the US, similar estimates from other countries, estimates of prevalence of third-gender minorities in other cultures, and anecdotal evidence about the prevalence of crossdressers and how many of them seemed to go on to transition. All of these gave estimates in the same general range. At the time, the scientific consensus was that transsexuality was very rare, 1 in 30,000 for trans women and 1 in 100,000 for trans men.
Surprise, surprise: the engineer (also, one of the first several hundred trans women to transition in the US) who bothered to get the data and do a little math was right.
if anyone is interested. Trigger warning for the sort of people who post trigger warnings: she wrote this 20+ years ago and therefore inevitably uses dated language. Deal with it or don't, but don't whine about it.
Lynn Conway is a bad faith actor who engaged in a malicious smear campaign against J. Michael Bailey, which was uncovered by Alice Dreger--first in a peer-reviewed journal article, and later in her book, Galileo's Middle Finger. Conway, after identifying as an autogyenphile in private, took umbrage at Bailey's use of Ray Blanchard's typology of MTF transexuals because it attributed the desire to transition to homosexuality or autogynephilia. In other words, after admitting to autogynephilia, Conway attacked the charcter or a man whose ideas Conway had previously endorsed in private. These ideas were based on in-depth research with transsexuals conducted by people who were advocates of this tiny and mostly unknown group of people. Conway knowlingly, falsely accused Bailey of having sex with a research participant and other academic misconduct. During the attack campaign, Conway also posted a picture of Bailey's very young daughter, labeled something like "*ock-starved *itch." The exact phrase escapes me, but "*ock-starved" was definitely in there. This is not a person who is interested in reaching the truth about anything. This is somebody who will go to any lengths to promote an ideology upon which their entire subjective reality is based, regardless of whether that worldview has merit or not.
You can find Dreger's article about the smear campaign here:
In 2003, psychology professor and sex researcher J. Michael Bailey published a book entitled The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. The book’s portrayal of male-to-female (MTF) transsexu...
The stuff I've posted is what people are being taught in professional programs. It's not irrelevant "academy" BS. Queer theory is watered down form is the dominant ideology underlying trans today. Nobody with knowledge about the issue thinks otherwise; they only differ in whether they accept or reject its core rationale.
Did you read the stories? I ask you again how queer theory informs those stories, and informs your judgment of these individuals? Does your rejection of queer theory lead you to invalidate what they describe, or lead you to feel they are not deserving of autonomy and our respect? If you don’t reject their autonomy, then it follows you would want to work to accommodate them as much as possible? Yes or no?
This post was edited 10 minutes after it was posted.
If you look at the NPR article, you will see that they don't take any position, but merely report that the World Athletic Council said themselves- that limited evidence exists but they are looking into it. PBS if reporting what was said, as they are expected to do. WA said it. Fox misinterprets it, yet again.
Here is exactly what PBS said in the article:
"World Athletics Council acknowledges that there is limited research on elite transgender athletes At the center of the issue is whether transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over other female competitors, even after lowering their testosterone levels. But there is limited scientific research involving elite transgender athletes — which the council also acknowledged. World Athletics Council said that they have conducted their own research over the past decade and that they found there can be an impact in performance. Several international groups including the Human Rights Watch have called the council's evidence flawed."
PBS doesn't call it flawed. They report that others have called it flawed. They are merely reporting though they take no stand themselves.
World Athletics Council said they prioritize fairness and the integrity of female track and field competitions, rather than inclusion. The ruling could hinder several Olympic medalists.
No disagreement with #1, 2, and 4, but #3 is a societal choice of whether to justify discrimination or not. The same argument wouldn’t and mostly hasn’t worked to justify the pay gap in women’s sport relative to men.
The same argument has not worked to justify the pay gap between men and women? Then why do we have so much gap between ATP and WTA Tours, PGA and LPGA Tours, or men's World Cup and women's World Cup? What argument has been used to justify it? The pay gap exists whether it is justifiable or not. I'd rather work on closing that gap first before worrying about the prize money for trans athletes.
If you look at the NYCM last year, you can easily see why the nonbinary division shouldn't have got the prize money they did. First, there were far fewer competitors in the nonbinary division. Being 1st, 2nd 3rd among 100 people should not have the same value as being 1st, 2nd and 3rd among 10,000 people. Second, the two people who won the money in the nonbinary division were slower than many of the women who didn't get a penny. Now how does that make any sense to anyone? You have biological advantage (both were natal males), and you ran slower, and still get prize money?
If NYRR wants to give prize money to nonbinary runners, let them find a sponsor who gives money specifically for that purpose. Otherwise, the money can be better used for other purposes like an outreach program for local LGBTQ youth runners.
Participating in sports is a fundamental right, but earning money from sports is not.
I agree there is still a significant pay gap between men and women in the same sports, but we’ve also made significant progress towards achieving parity in some cases like soccer and alpine skiing for example, but more importantly gender equity in pay in employment broadly speaking has long gained societal acceptance and legal support, and in sport, there is still a difference but not an order of magnitude in prize money and salary, but the societal discourse has already shifted towards striving for equity.
When I said, #3 is a choice of whether to justify discrimination or not, that is exactly what I meant. A separate category for trans will probably either result in an order of magnitude lower earnings for trans — which would be discrimination in my view — or fervent complaints about stealing money from the other categories.
I don’t have an answer for and don’t need to answer how it makes sense to award nonbinaries more money than faster women. You seem to believe a separate non-binary category is best, and if you also believe they should only earn what their event’s eyeballs can justify, they are just screwed to hell. That’s a societal choice to make, not a self-evident proposition to me.
If you look at the NPR article, you will see that they don't take any position, but merely report that the World Athletic Council said themselves- that limited evidence exists but they are looking into it. PBS if reporting what was said, as they are expected to do. WA said it. Fox misinterprets it, yet again.
Here is exactly what PBS said in the article:
"World Athletics Council acknowledges that there is limited research on elite transgender athletes At the center of the issue is whether transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over other female competitors, even after lowering their testosterone levels. But there is limited scientific research involving elite transgender athletes — which the council also acknowledged. World Athletics Council said that they have conducted their own research over the past decade and that they found there can be an impact in performance. Several international groups including the Human Rights Watch have called the council's evidence flawed."
PBS doesn't call it flawed. They report that others have called it flawed. They are merely reporting though they take no stand themselves.
You make good points here, and frequently do on a variety of subjects. Thing is, it's pointless to discuss, let alone argue with these morons on letsrun. They might not be as dumb as the trolls on Yahoo or 4-chan or Fox, but they are obtuse and wouldn't know a data point from a trend if a trend of 2X4s flew by with a p-value of 0.025 of getting struck in the head.
Thanks for this heartbreaking article. I knew about the Kentucky bill, but didn't know the story of Karen and Henry Berg.
Using procedural trickery to prevent a vote on her amendment that would require teachers to address students as their parents request -- whether cis or trans -- shows that the bill has nothing to do with protecting students from alleged transgroomer teachers and everything to do with ostracizing trans children. As Karen Berg said, “Your vote ‘yes’ on this bill means one of two things. Either you believe that trans children do not exist or you believe that trans children do not deserve to exist.”
The former belief can only come from ignorance. The latter can only come from hatred.
Your last sentence shows your inability to critically distance yourself from the cultural waters in which you swim. "Trans" is a relatively recent, Western way of understanding behavior; one can look back only a few decades to see how the category has shifted over time. Trans was once defined as a biological or psychological phenomenon that led some people to become transsexual (this meant that one had surgery); now it is a mystical category describing any person who experiences discomfort with one's sexed body or wants to peform affectations associated with the other sex for pleasure. At the extremes, trans parts ways with sex entirely and becomes an ideology through which hyperliberal ideas (individuals are disembodied subjectivities) combine with technology in an effort to transcent the human body. Human beings are males and females who reproduce through sexual intercourse; transhumans sculpt the body into whatever the mind desires, even escaping the body entirely to live entirely in the digital world.
Here you are calling people ignorant and genocidal, and yet you are operating from a deeply presentist and ethnocentic viewpoint--one that advocates for radical interventions into the minds and bodies of minors, preventing them from undergoing normal developmental processes, sterilizing them before they have the capacity to weigh risks and benefits and understand themselves.
You repeatedly keep propagating this myth of trans being a recent phenomenon, when the fluidity of sex as well as gender has been recognized for millenia. Hijras appear even in Indian mythology that is so old that it’s not even dated.
And how did you "learn" all that? Not from anything written by "Western" authors, right?
What you and GD are doing is the classical definition of cultural imperialism. You are interpreting non-Western world through the culturally biased Western lenses.
When she made that claim on the board before, I asked her for evidence. She pointed to Brazilian drag performers who did not have female self-identity. That's like saying there is no trans woman in today's Australia because Courtney Act self-identifies as a male.
When I asked her opinion about this 80 yr old trans woman from Japan who has been known to the public for over half a century, she had no response.
In some "Western" people's mind, the reality exists only when it is recorded in a Western language (or even worse, only in English). Everything else is irrelevant to them. I have encountered this attitude from so many people in so many different settings.
And the big irony is that GD called another poster "ethnocentric."
It's pointless arguing with you because you repeatedly misinterpret others, sometimes intentionally. I never once referred to Brazilian drag performers. The Travesti are not "drag performers." They are not trans, nor is the "trans woman from Japan." Different cultures have different ways of understanding gender nonconformity, and many of those identified by Westerners as "trans" are homosexuals enacting homosexuality in the ways expected by their local culture. The idea that people could "self-identify as female" is ridiculous to most people from most cultures throughout human history. Ethnocentricity is the thing causing you to mistake all of these different phenomena as "trans."
As Yifffie McGee wrote above, current Western ideas about trans come from queer theory, which is itself downstream of French postmodernist philosophy. We can also pepper in some social constructionists like John Money and others involved in sex reassignment over the past 100 years. Rejecting the ideas of French postmodernists and their American students does not make somebody a bigot or ignorant.
I did not grow up in a Western society, and I don't have Western educated parents. So if I am "ethnocentric" that means I am looking at this from non-Western perspective.
That 80 yr old person is not identified by Westerners as trans. She says she had extreme discomfort with her gender from early childhood, decades before there was any word for transgender or gender dysphoria. How was someone born in a small Japanese city 80 yrs ago influenced by French Postmodernism?
Was Harisu influenced by French postmodernism? How about Nong Poy and Alicia Liu? They all self-identify as female. It is not Westerners who are identifying them as trans. Contrary to your Euroccentric belief, they are actually capable of expressing their own identity.
No disagreement with #1, 2, and 4, but #3 is a societal choice of whether to justify discrimination or not. The same argument wouldn’t and mostly hasn’t worked to justify the pay gap in women’s sport relative to men.
On the three choices, sure, but there is also 4) to treat transwomen as women but impose eligibility criteria that are provably performance discriminators, can be realistically modified by transwomen, and aim to achieve parity between the percentage of transwomen winners and their presence in the general population. This is easier said than done of course, but one that is robust in the long-term to challenges in court on the basis of discrimination on the basis of gender; and one that accords transwomen the dignity of their identity.
It is not possible to create eligibility criteria that allows trans women to compete against cis women fairly.
Can’t take seriously sweeping claims without any depth, nuance, or expert knowledge from someone who has never exhibited these traits on these boards on this topic. We disagree.
Funny that you find it so easy to assume that anyone would lightly make the decision of losing body parts or functions permanently without a compelling distressing condition and without doing sufficient research into outcomes.
Bro if hunter wheres the blow and Armstronglivs (two of the most left-wing people on this board) disagree with you, it probably means you're wrong. Just give it up.
Can’t care less about your labels or handles on this site. One is an insufferable nutcase I’ve long blocked like for over a year, and the other is a lightweight that’s harmless.
Lynn Conway is a bad faith actor who engaged in a malicious smear campaign against J. Michael Bailey, which was uncovered by Alice Dreger--first in a peer-reviewed journal article, and later in her book, Galileo's Middle Finger. Conway, after identifying as an autogyenphile in private, took umbrage at Bailey's use of Ray Blanchard's typology of MTF transexuals because it attributed the desire to transition to homosexuality or autogynephilia.
You can attribute just about anything to anyone as having been admitted to “in private”. Conway has led a practically an entire life consistent with her gender identification and early dysphoria. There is no evidence that autogynephelia had anything to do with it.
