The costs of trans visibility

You're going off on tangents and using straw-man and ad hominem arguments ("middles aged dudes who are offended by the thought of trans individuals simply existing...")

Could you just clarify in a couple of sentences the position you are advocating?

In particular, do you believe that anyone who claims to be transgender should be permitted to have access to women's spaces with no restrictions whatsoever? If you favour some sort of restrictions, which ones specifically? Do you have any concerns that the policies you are advocating for could potentially put some women at risk?

I've already explained why it's problematic

My main goal is to reflect how absurd many of the stances and statemetns made against trans are in this thread. If it appears that my arguments are straw-man or ad hominem then maybe you guys should be looking in the mirror as that is the intent of my posts.

I don't have the answers. I just know that "we can't allow trans women into the womens bathrooms because men are perverts" is a stupid stance. Your solution is to force trans men into womens bathrooms! Just writing that gave me whiplash.

I'd prefer to believe that most people in the world generally want to be good and want the world to be good. That social contract is literally the only thing keeping things from flying off the rails as it is. Laws aren't a good way of regulating behavior.

Your reasoning that its problematic is that guys are on fetlife to get laid and women are on fetlife to fulfill their sexual fantasies?

Do you think its problematic because you believe that men who want to fulfill their sexual fantasies aren't on fetlife? I'm not following.

That's a banable offense right there, IMHO.

Great so that is 2/2 articles that immediately make clear she is trans. If you read that article and go to the article that JK Rolling cites, that article ALSO makes clear that she is trans. So 3/3. So when you said this:

Probably somewhere there is a bad bad bad media article - the internet is a big place after all - but you haven't even provided an example of this. And it is all rather beside the point, I quoted washoe to point out the pattern of certain folks centering their conversations around the "bad trans person of the day". That point is just as valid or invalid whether you want to go on some poorly motivated side quest about accurate media reporting or not.

Your position is just a cop-out though. I also believe most people are trying to do good, but sometimes there are conflicts and you have to take a position. If one person says to a biological male trying to enter a female change-room, "Look, I have a history of being sexually harassed and I don't feel comfortable with you being in my changeroom because it would trigger my traumatic memories," and the other person goes "I'm trans gender so using the other room would trigger my gender dysphoria," how are you going to resolve that?

And not everyone has good intentions. You talk about the social contract, part of a contract is that it can be enforced if someone breaches it.

So you admit that leaving out the fact that this person is a transgender would be bad journalism.

How about reporting the crime as female violence for crime statistics is that also wrong in your mind?

I've cornered you with your own logic uke! Now uke wants all transwomen that commit crimes to be reported as such. We're making progress here. Good job.

I'm generally left leaning and had an interest in gender dysphoria before it was cool. But I've come around to see that the conservative view is largely correct on this one, though the right no longer really has the capacity to discuss anything reasonably. While I still think gender dysphoria is a real condition, and people who have it should be treated well, "trans ideology" or whatever you want to call it is a different kettle of fish.

A big red flag for me is the fact that they are always lying, or at least propagandizing. For example, legislation that limits unproven treatments with serious side effects being given to minors is met with "transchildren are being denied healthcare!" Yes, every political camp has some of this. With trans, it is relentless.

Here, Sabine Hossenfelder, who is a physicist with a PhD and generally has very mainstream views, identifies 2 examples of academic fraud put forward for the trans cause. Sabine stops short of calling it fraud only because we don't know for sure why the papers used janky methodology. One changed the research protocols after the results didn't go as desired. Another ran with a sample size of 7.

Here's one I stumbled upon. And it's not like I spend hours pouring over this stuff.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...

I don't think I have to explain why this is obviously false. But for example, in order for this to be true, it would have to be the case that height is not an advantage in basketball or volleyball. Or, that being a trans woman has some other effect that makes you so bad at those sports your height can't help you.

They arrived at this conclusion by going through some studies comparing performance and finding faults with the studies. Therefore, there is "no evidence" that any difference in performance exists, therefore we should assume that it does not. I doubt the authors, or the people who published the article are so stupid that they believe this is good evidence for their claim. They are just fanatics who don't care.

Also, the ideology/movement now extends beyond people who have gender dysphoria. In some cases, these are people with autism or mental health issues who erroneously believe they have gender dysphoria. I personally know 2 people who have other mental health and behavioral problems who have decided well into adulthood that they suddenly have gender dysphoria. I also know one trans man who really has it. I know it's lame to say, "I'm not a psychologist but..." However, I'm not a psychologist but the difference between these people is like night and day. The newly trans people, for example, ramble about the ideology behind it like religious converts and constantly call attention to their being trans. While the trans man is just a regular person.

A friend, who is a moderately well known leftist commentator recently mentioned to me that "every other kid" in his son's school is trans, now. I've seen enough liberal, leftist and centrist people--level headed people--say this to where I believe it is something of a fad or contagion.

Here an article in The Advocate discusses how people who have gender dysphoria should welcome trans people who don't have gender dysphoria, even those who are trans purely for political reasons, lest they follow in the footsteps of TERFs

https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2019...

Ultimately, this ish is just crazy. From what I can understand, a lot of the theory behind it derives from post-modernism (kind of a vague term, I know) and critical theory. This makes a lot of sense, as those views often view truth as non-existent or irrelevant. As with fascism, the only thing that matters is power. Whatever you say in service of your cause is fine, because you are trying to gain power for the right people. Admittedly, I'm not an expert as I studied politics and philosophy. Professionals in those fields don't take these views very seriously, and they are espoused mostly by like, Communications professors or Lit profs with inferiority complexes.

It's bad because it's crazy. I also do not want a post-truth ethic and absurd philosophies to take hold on the left, as they have on the right.

I also think transgenderism is bad for people with GD. I think if we treated GD realistically, without the ideology, there would not be much controversy. i.e, there are a very small number of people who have GD. The kind thing to do is call them what they want to be called, date who they want to date and perhaps make some other allowances. I really don't know many people who take issue with that and in fact, for many years, I think that's how it worked. Transpeople were widely known about for a long time without it being a headline grabbing controversy. Not that transphobia was non-existent. But it wasn't a national obsession.

The big conflicts come when someone who says they are a lesbian and has a penis demands to play on the girl's volleyball team and expects everyone to undress in front of them. Or giving unproven treatments that have dire side effects to minors. Or teaching trans ideology below the college level. Or claiming it's bigotry for women to want their rape survivors group to be just for biological women. etc. etc.

They should probably fire both their spokesperson and their PR firm.

I don't think I get this. But, I think that when the right is right (these days, in the US) it's often in cartoon form. Like Hillary, W. and others are horrible people who killed a lot of babies. But it wasn't in underground satanic rituals, it was by dropping bombs on them.

So I think they are right that there is a crazy ideology at work here, but they are kind of hysterical about it and it's not the end of the world and the 4th grade teachers at your local school are not trying to turn all the kids trans.

welcome to the thread es2, sadly they are probably going to delete your post and give you a one week ban though :(

Nope. Out of curiosity, do you say blackchildren and blackpeople or is this little quirk just something you say about trans people?

I was just poking fun at you some.

The media makes caricatures of both the "right" and the "left" so that the opposing side can dig in and feel like they're so much better than them. So there is a strawman "left" and a strawman "right" (In quotes not because they are strawpeople but because we're talking about the cultural right and left which are different from the actual right and left).

I think your post was fine and perhaps I'll respond to some other aspects of it, but any time I see people talking about the "right" or "left" like you did-- like they are some singular entity, I assume they watch too much cable news.

and so it begins, ignore a well thought out and nuanced post and find one little thing in it to attack

congrats uke, you're not at all living up all the stereotypes of horribly biased academics fighting social wars

I imagine there probably are some heated debates about mathematical topics but that the field as a whole is probably quite boring-- so don't try to take this away from him-- he needs it.

Get to the nuance then.

The right embraces a certain type of idea for fear: immigration, communism, trans whatever. And they don't make their case at all. That's the bottom line.

We need immigrants, so the right retreat to some argument for proper vetting (if they're not overtly racist and thereby in complete opposition like Steven Miller), while openly trying to gut the federal agencies that are needed for administration of that very process.

The policy is listed in the forum posting guidelines stickied thread under the bolded section about transgender guidelines. Though I suspect you know exactly why you were banned, given your post started out with this:

It’s just so glaringly bad, like does one need to put the low hanging fruit so close to the ground?

Math has the advantage that one doesn’t really “debate” most things, because we prove the theorems and then everyone agrees (with a few notable counterexamples) unless some mistake in the proof is found. Basically nothing from my academic life has anything to do with my worldview on trans people other than perhaps just having lots of trans students over the years.

I've said it before. To actively fear some absurdity of the most fringe - one that requires actual surgical modification to one's person - as though it's gonna be viewed more attractive by society than the status quo alternative lol is stupid af, I'm sorry.

I'm reminded of that scene in Forrest Gump when Forrest tells LBJ he got shot in the butt and LBJ whispers to him ..."I'd kinda like to take a look at that"

This has come up many times before in various posts. It's fine if Uke wants to make a post to inform someone about what is becoming the most commonly used style structure when referring to trans people. However, beyond that single post, we arent going to spin off into a grammar derail every time someone uses a different form. We now have a grammar thread for that.

Do you understand that the fact you had "lots" of trans student when actual trans people are less than one in a thousand, already means something extremely weird is happening in your job and you are being heavily influenced by that?

Most people don't have a single actual trans person (someone who consistently thought to be of the opposite sex and lived as such, not some random confused kid going through phases) in their life.

Most people never had a trans person working with them, or in their family, or being a customer

It's because most of the people he's referring to are college students, eg "random confused kid[s] going through phases". The most common time for any person to try out anything out of the ordinary is while they're in college. Some stick with those unusual roles/practices, but most do not.