Transgender bathrooms?

[Buster's Uncle]

You can certainly say that here...

[Valka]

It probably sounds intolerant, right? Well, I would probably have signed the petition if it hadn't made that ridiculous analogy with people who have more immediate life-threatening situations.

[Buster's Uncle]

No, I see the logic...  Knowing you, it's certainly not because 'trannies are wrong and discusting and sinful'...

[Lorizael]

I wouldn't have signed the petition because I don't support things, and the analogy to life-saving medical interventions is clearly off, but transgendered folk generally suffer from a lower quality of life due to mental health problems. There are plenty of medical conditions out there which do nothing more than greatly reduce quality of life that we still feel the need to treat and pay for (via insurance), despite the fact that life-threatening illnesses are still a thing.

[Elok]

Glad to see you back.

How is that weird autoimmune reaction, if so, not simply a mechanism for triggering gay uncles according to my theory?  Seems to fit together fine, to me...

And I'd say there's something to that proxy war thing you say, but more of it's as simple as it looks - one side finds trans people weird and disturbing and challenging to perceptions of reality (and the name/pronoun problem if you care about courtesy is irritating) versus the left crowd going "it takes all kinds, respect difference, sucks to be them - let's cut 'em a break".  That it's lining up along predictable lines is just the world we're stuck in currently; EVERYthing's a culture war these days.

Re: autoimmune, we're used to thinking of biology as "the way things are designed" or "the way the genes make things," but really a lot of it (as the hosts of other autoimmune disorders indicates) is that our bodies are absurdly complicated machines, and sometimes things go awry, and there isn't any particular constructive "reason" for it.  We don't look for why evolution selected for some people to get lupus, or type 1 diabetes (though we do look into the causes of those things for the sake of curing them); the quest to know what causes homosexuality is all wrapped up in the desire to vindicate it as normal and healthy, and if it exists because having one recessive gay gene does something good, or what-have-you, that sounds better than if gays are just the equivalent of albinos.

Re: the TG, you're describing the superficial aspects of the thing.  Look at it this way: twenty years ago, gay marriage was a pie in the sky.  Even ten years ago, it was something of a long shot.  It arrived almost overnight, with many prominent people (including Obama and HRC) apparently changing their opinions 180 within about five years.  Now, immediately after Obergefell, there's a push for TG rights, which would have been deemed even more absurd not so long ago.  And it's pushing hard.  The question is not "what consequences will follow allowing this tiny minority to use the wrong bathroom" but "if we give into them on this, what new value change will be forced on us next?  And when and where will it end?"  These laws are a (vain) attempt by the red dog to pee on the hydrant so the blue dog will stay out of his territory.  They're trying to opt out of the broader revolution, whatever that is.

(edit for trivial typo that still bugged me)

[Buster's Uncle]

[ninja'd.  -I'll get to that, E]

Hmm.  I would mention that I just don't understand trans and the whole thing makes me uncomfortable, and I get where the discriminators are coming from.

But I dunno, it strikes me as like the time in sixth grade I had a spontaneous nose bleed in class, and the other kids were giving me a lot of crap because they found my affliction disgusting, as if it was for their benefit, and I wasn't the one bleeding. from. his. face. and being humiliated for it because that wasn't bad enough.

Having profound personal identity issues has to suck beyond words, and I don't know that trans people would like me labeling them as afflicted, exactly, but I'd invite the religious/social conservatives without hesitation to see it that way, pointing out that discriminating against yon dude(?) in a dress is like heaping ashes on the heads of lepers instead of alms, and contrary to their cherished belief set...

[Elok]

Seriously, it's not about the TGs themselves.  You can go weeks at a time, or longer, without ever knowingly encountering a TG person.  They're rarer than hens' teeth.  It's more about what goes along with them--that each social change is used as precedent for further social change, and comes with various policies and programs which will be used both to enact the desired change and to punish/marginalize dissenters.  Which is at the heart of this: the dissenters/discriminators feel, largely correctly, that they are having the rug pulled out from under their feet.  There is no discussion, no room for compromise, only "comply, or suffer."

To distill what this is really all about for them, imagine that your five-year-old daughter likes to play with action figures, dislikes dresses, etc.  You assume she is simply a tomboy.  School counselors, however, encourage her to consider the possibility that she might feel like she is more of a boy on the inside.  You protest, and are met with various administrators from various state bureaucracies suggesting threateningly that you might be creating a psychologically restrictive and damaging environment for your child.  The child's teachers and schoolmates (who have more progressive parents, and watch cartoons where a sympathetic trans character appears regularly) are all against you.  As you continue to fight, they cut ties, and stop inviting you to social events.  Eventually, around age ten, the authorities start talking to the girl about hormonal therapies.

The above is an extreme and even paranoid example, but I can tell you that it's a good example of what really worries them: that a progressive agenda, pushed by a cadre of government agencies and culture-forming institutions (news media, academia, entertainment), is going to quite simply hijack their society and undermine everything they believe in, and call them troglodytes and shun them if they try to fight back.  That is far scarier than a few isolated weirdoes tinkling in the wrong place.  And when people kindly explain to them that all their fears come from them being stupid ignorant bigots, that simply tells them they're right to be afraid.

[DrazharLn]

Trans people suffer serious discrimination now, so serious that suicide is epidemic amongst trans people.

Advocating for continued discrimination against trans people because it protects against potential future discrimination against a currently powerful group (social conservatives) seems a bit odd.

Why not help the trans people now and trust that, actually, they don't want to steal yo kids, and if they do, your faction is much more powerful anyway.

[Elok]

More powerful?  It's really not, and hasn't been for some time.  The situation is analogous to a Civ4 game where a recently-taken city is still 75% CultureA, but CultureB has taken over and built new temples, universities, etc. so that all the new culture being produced is CultureB.  The supposed power and influence of CultureA is simply inertia; it takes a long time for a group that's been ousted from power to completely lose its influence in this particular context.

[Elok]

Okay, yes, they're more powerful than trans people by themselves, but the same is true of almost any other group, including librarians and left-handed dogcatchers.  Compared to trans people, gays, and their sundry allies--at this point, the national government and most large businesses are quite firmly on the social progress side, along with most major news outlets and even some private and ostensibly religious schools--the might of social conservatives is laughable.  They've been fighting defensively for fifty years; this is merely the latest front they've been forced to retreat from.  There will be a different one in another five years, most likely polyamorists, assuming no thermidorean reaction.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm going to have a lot to say in reaction when my thoughts organize, but that's all true about the give 'em an inch -going both ways- and that the conservatives have been losing on the culture side longer than I've been alive -unabated since the Reagan Revolution began- even as the SOBs have been winning on the government side ever since, and little but.

[Buster's Uncle]

Re: autoimmune, we're used to thinking of biology as "the way things are designed" or "the way the genes make things," but really a lot of it (as the hosts of other autoimmune disorders indicates) is that our bodies are absurdly complicated machines, and sometimes things go awry, and there isn't any particular constructive "reason" for it.  We don't look for why evolution selected for some people to get lupus, or type 1 diabetes (though we do look into the causes of those things for the sake of curing them); the quest to know what causes homosexuality is all wrapped up in the desire to vindicate it as normal and healthy, and if it exists because having one recessive gay gene does something good, or what-have-you, that sounds better than if gays are just the equivalent of albinos.

Elok, this is how evolution works.  A mutation/variation pops up through something like the autoimmune problem, and most variations just make dead babies or mules - but if the 'mule' somehow reliably causes enough relatives to do enough better, evolution will select for it.  Relatives doing better = more babies from the same family with the autoimmune thing.

I'm not making a moral argument and I'm not interested in vindicating anything - I'm just trying to figure out why a trait that ought to breed out of the gene pool doesn't.  I can't refute the logic of that guy you read upthread or anything - And Yet, the historical trends/factors/circumstances I've identified connected to the (at least wide-spread, open) expression of homosexuality are a thing, and I don't think bearded husbands manging to breed (though that's a thing, too) begin to explain it.

What that autoimmune thing might be is a triggering mechanism for making gay uncles when there's a lot of uncles on hand.  Nature doesn't care what The Plan is, nature just cares what (ad-hoc, by accident) works somehow to make more viable babies who DO breed.

That's why sickle cell anemia has persisted in certain populations - it's not as bad as malaria, against which it confers some sizable advantage.  (It's a problem these days because they're not in Africa anymore and we have much better ways of fighting malaria now.)  If those albinos you mention had enough advantage against some new thing that persisted long enough and made many people dead, you'd see a lot more of them in whoever was around a few hundred years later...

[Elok]

Okay, I get what you're saying, but my intended point is that it needn't have a reason at all.  It might simply be a relatively benign defect that happens for no good reason.  I mean, ALS/Lou Gehrig's disease really does seem to have a variety of genetic factors behind it, and all that does is inexorably kill you.  Likewise cystic fibrosis; I'm unaware of any evidence that there's an upside that keeps "drown in own chewy mucus" genes in the population (not that I've looked, and assuming it's genetic).  Albinism itself is a straight weakness with no advantage; it still happens in every race.  Now, all these things are much rarer than homosexuality, but they're also much more maladaptive.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'd rather be an albino, I think.

-And you know, I don't believe God made a deterministic universe, anyway.  There may be a Purpose and a Plan, but getting away from what Jesus told us about us, I doubt we have any inkling of the Plan when it comes to the beast and their fields - the mechanisms of creation appear to have a lot of chaos built in.  He built something considerably more complex than a Clockwork Universe.  You might get born gay, or albino, or with high-functioning autism - we all have challenges put in our path, and it's what you do with them that Matters...

[Buster's Uncle]

...WTH, Elok?  I bring theology into it and nothing to say? ...