Transgender bathrooms?

[vonbach]

(a) There's no evidence Aristotle ever said that

Lol nice try. The truth is he's right and we can all see it.
A society without moral standards falls apart and liberals don't
have moral standards, they just follow whats fashionable.
So society falls into a death spiral until non liberals put
their foot down and stop it.

[Buster's Uncle]

[vonbach]

[Buster's Uncle]

I remember when I could have discussions about current affairs in this folder without being annoyed by juvenile trash-talk.  I like diversity, or I'd have never pointed you at this folder - but I also like people who think for themselves and don't stink up the place with the same old unreflected crap I could hear anywhere.  Ignoring it doesn't stop it stinking up the forum.  Arguing with it -and I've become picky about who I'll argue with online, and this has never met my personal standards of being worth my time- doesn't make it go away and always ends up getting ruder than I'm comfortable with.  I'm so, so very tired of this nonsense, and I ran out of ideas for dealing with it months ago.

[mod hat]No more about your imaginary liberals.  And class up your act in Rec Commons in general.  -The community would miss your genuinely valuable on-topic posts in other subforums if you didn't.[/mod hat]

[vonbach]

Ah I see you want debate as long as I agree with you. Got it.

[Buster's Uncle]

You are a Serially Vexatious Poster who just responded to an official directive with a personal attack - 24 hours.

I'm interested in points of view other than my own, not least because it's dull when everyone agrees.  What I'm not interested in is stupid opinions I've already heard a million times not even expressed in a sophisticated way, or ever an original one.  There is neither entertainment nor learning to be had in that, and it gets in the way of the good stuff.

In real life, I walk away from people like you when current events come up - here, I own the place, and can't.

If what you say were true, I'd have perma'd you six months ago.  You've been seriously harming my enjoyment of Rec Commons -every time an interesting conversation tried to happen- for that long.

[Elok]

The thing is, VB, that's not "debate."  You aren't responding to any points in detail, or examining your own opinions, or even modifying the things you say to suit your particular audience of the moment.  You're simply vomiting unsubstantiated accusations at nobody in particular.  How are we supposed to debate with such flat declarations, beyond "nuh-uh" or "well, conservatives are [equally cartoonish caricature]"?  Neither option is constructive or interesting.

[Buster's Uncle]

Thank you, Elok.



-I think you're probably wrong about a trans being exactly a "lie", by the way.  That's a matter of perspective, for one thing, and assumes motives that don't necessarily follow.  It all depends on who that born-male person put the dress on for - to fool you not being in evidence.  Perhaps it's a lie 'he' tells 'him'self -I expect that's closer to where you mean to come from- but that's not quite the same thing, is it?  I feel safe in assuming that it's highly confusing to look down at your private parts and find them entirely the wrong sort.  I don't know that feeling that way is a lie, but I do think I ought to extend some compassion to someone who does.

I'm trying to be sympathetic to trans people here, because [shrugs] it's, at minimum, polite, which is always a thing to strive for.  Honestly, I've met one or two, didn't get to know them, and conceptually it freaks me out - but it's not like anyone has ever made their trans status my problem in any way.  -So, interesting conversation, and again, the bathroom stuff isn't going to get much traction for a very long time to come.

[Elok]

I'm trying to not be too offensive, but it's hard to inoffensively say "this person is mentally unwell."

As for "lying," I don't mean they're trying to trick me, but that trans status is a kind of dishonesty because "gender identity," such as it is, does not exist in a vacuum.  It exists to signal sex, which matters for a variety of reasons, not all of them what we think of as sexual.  Men relate to women differently than they do to other men even when they aren't remotely attracted to said women.  Even gay men treat women differently than men in conversation, and this is generally good; if we always spoke to women the way we often speak to each other, they'd probably take it very poorly.  This holds true even if you leave out the off-color jokes you probably think I'm talking about.  For example, men will argue with each other quite aggressively about anything or nothing and, unless the subject is quite personal or it gets heated, don't take it badly at all.  This same approach, taken with women, almost invariably gives offense.  I have extensive personal experience with this phenomenon, as you might imagine . . .

Ahem!  As I was saying.  Gender signaling is important for many reasons.  The problem with TGs is that they ape the signals, but without the substance to back it up.  Some of them may think and act like women in many ways (or men in the case of F-to-M), but they ultimately are not.  And it's not some trivial detail of irrelevant cosmetics, it shapes more of our relations than we usually like to acknowledge.

I think I differ from Lori in that I believe that, once you've stripped away all those accidents of birth he talks about--race, sex, genetics, ability--you find there's nothing left.  Or at least nothing interesting.  We are largely defined by our limitations, and I have a hard time picturing an actual intelligence divorced from those animal motives.  What this implies about God is a very interesting question, but I'm not about to get into that right now.

[Buster's Uncle]

Gender, as a rule, is profoundly fundamental to our identity and behavior in the ways you mention and more, absolutely; trans being a thing makes it confusing, no argument.  The pronoun problem alone is enormously irritating, if you care about courtesy.

-But I'd submit that the proper Christian position is to view trans people, not to be condescending and certainly not insulting, as afflicted, and react with compassion.  Sucks to be confused by a 'guy' in a dress?  Sucks more for 'him'.  'He's' in the middle of it every second, and I don't think an argument that it screws things up socially for others gets any more laundry done than saying we ought to ostracize lepers because their disease is off-putting.  -That wasn't exactly the position Jesus took when confronted with dusty leper feet.

---

Have I ever gone into my Gay Uncle Theory of why homosexuality doesn't breed itself out of the gene pool tout suite?

[Rusty Edge]

Gender, as a rule, is profoundly fundamental to our identity and behavior in the ways you mention and more, absolutely; trans being a thing makes it confusing, no argument.  The pronoun problem alone is enormously irritating, if you care about courtesy.

-But I'd submit that the proper Christian position is to view trans people, not to be condescending and certainly not insulting, as afflicted, and react with compassion.  Sucks to be confused by a 'guy' in a dress?  Sucks more for 'him'.  'He's' in the middle of it every second, and I don't think an argument that it screws things up socially for others gets any more laundry done than saying we ought to ostracize lepers because their disease is off-putting.  -That wasn't exactly the position Jesus took when confronted with dusty leper feet.

---

Have I ever gone into my Gay Uncle Theory of why homosexuality doesn't breed itself out of the gene pool tout suite?

As an animal breeder, I've made the acquaintance of 10s of thousands of them, and I no longer hold such a binary view of sex or gender or whatever. That's like saying that everybody has 2 chromosomes. Most of us do, but not all of us. Individuals may appear to be one thing or the other, but that can change with puberty. There are males, females, and a variety of hermaphrodites. Animals go nude. People wear clothes and have hair in discrete places. Short of being thoroughly sexually intimate or doing lab work, it's pretty hard to be sure of what we think we know.

Not every individual sorts out in binary fashion.

"All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord hath made them all!"

I try to error on the side of the Golden Rule and "judge not lest ye be judged".

[Buster's Uncle]

There is more in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

And how's the one about 'the beginning of wisdom is to know how little you know' go?

I know I don't really understand the trans thing, though this thread is helping me sort my thoughts...

[Rusty Edge]

My wife is on an e-mail list.

One of the guys on it is very handsome and a certified genius. Perfect in many ways. He worked for a university in some capacity.

He was also a certified chimera. That is to say, His DNA chromosome profile was different depending upon whether he was sampled with a cheek swab or a blood test. ( I forget the particulars) .He said he was visually attracted to men, but found their scent repulsive, so he was theoretically gay, but asexual in practice. So, it kinda sucked to be him.

[Elok]

Gender, as a rule, is profoundly fundamental to our identity and behavior in the ways you mention and more, absolutely; trans being a thing makes it confusing, no argument.  The pronoun problem alone is enormously irritating, if you care about courtesy.

-But I'd submit that the proper Christian position is to view trans people, not to be condescending and certainly not insulting, as afflicted, and react with compassion.  Sucks to be confused by a 'guy' in a dress?  Sucks more for 'him'.  'He's' in the middle of it every second, and I don't think an argument that it screws things up socially for others gets any more laundry done than saying we ought to ostracize lepers because their disease is off-putting.  -That wasn't exactly the position Jesus took when confronted with dusty leper feet.

---

Have I ever gone into my Gay Uncle Theory of why homosexuality doesn't breed itself out of the gene pool tout suite?

I'm not arguing for putting TGs in a little box and poking them with sticks or anything.  I do believe that it's kindest to simply play along in most cases, right up to letting them in the bathrooms.  However, that imperative doesn't change the fundamental unsoundness of believing that one is a woman in plain biological reality, but really a man in some mystical and ill-defined sense which for some reason is allowed to take primacy over the (in the vast majority of cases) unambiguous physical truth.  These people (and everyone around them) would be much better off with consistent sex and gender, and being supportive to the extreme of looking at plain birth defects and declaring "non-binary gender" is likely to undermine any efforts to that end.*SEE BELOW*

Once we have reached that extreme, I have severe doubts about the ability of scientists to be reasonable in the face of progressive political pressure.  As it stands, I believe a perfectly unbiased researcher could discover very strong evidence that trans people are, say, more likely to be criminals (or something else unhelpful to the LGBTAQetc. cause), and find himself incapable of publishing it.  No journal would accept the paper, no matter how strong.  If he tried, it would risk his career.  Whatever the truth is about these people, we are not likely to find it under such circumstances.

As for the Gay Uncle, you're not the first to propose it.  The difficulty is that homosexuality is tantamount to sterility, so the gay uncle advantage (and/or heterozygote advantage) would have to be positively enormous to offset.  Gay uncled kids would need to be something like fifty percent more likely to survive for it to make sense.  Which doesn't mean homosexuality doesn't have biological roots--it certainly seems to--but the jury is still out on why it's there or what it's for.

EDIT: TO BE CLEAR, by "efforts to that end," I mean discovering the causes of this phenomenon so that future people can be spared the indignity of a persistent compulsion for the impossible.  I don't mean forcing them to dress like their biological sex or anything.  It would be helpful to know what percentage of the TG are chimeras, mosaics, developed as the opposite of their genetic sex, or simply born gender-ambiguous.  In some cases, there may be no clear answer, and the individual's choice may be as good as any other method to decide.

[Buster's Uncle]

This dances up to a principle that I hold dear and don't think our society pays enough pragmatic attention to; at some point, preventing one person from being backed over by a garbage truck might not worth waking up millions and millions at 6 AM with the beeper.  It's like being a mother so overprotective that it profoundly damages the child other ways - it's trying to ensure that no one will ever die when that's not faintly possible - it's overkill, or easily can be.  It's possible, to loose sight of the forest for the trees, trying to micromanage safety and justice.

Whether this is issue is that, I can't say, but there are some signs of it if I'm not completely wrong about the statistics...