Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on So, Dan.

How on earth do they get from one to the other?

Leap of faith.

Call me paranoid, but I think there’s more to it than that. They look like two serarate, but connected moves.

Opening girls’ sports to boys who claim to be girls will only result in a tiny number of trans girls joining teams anyway so it’s not a problem”

First, minimize the the imposition. Make the problem look small; make the reaction to it look extreme and unreasonable. “It’s only a few, what’s the harm? You’re over-reacting!” And this is setting aside the fact that however “few” boys are admitted to teams, at least that number of girls will be cheated out of playing on that team at all, and any girls from other schools who lose to teams with boys on them are also being cheated out of victories and awards. TAs have to clothe their own demands in the language of “fairness” and “justice” to hide the injustice to which girls will be subjected. They claim priority in their manufactured hierarchy of injustice. “Look, we’re fighting cis privilege!” This is on top of the absolute necessity to completely disguise the fact that what is being demanded is boys playing on girls’s teams, which would be a much harder sell to call “just” or “fair.”

“Not letting the boys join girls’ teams will result in all the girls having their genitals checked to ensure they are not boys”

Part of this may be an unjustified confidence in the ability of boys to pass as girls. This ability diminishes considerable after puberty. Long, multicoloured hair, lipstick, and head tilting can only get so far against the primal, finely-tuned evolutionary skill of being able to tell males from females.

I believe that this idea of “genital inspections” is a threat. It’s being presented in such a way that it portrays the poor TIMs as being subjected to this inhumane treatment, but I think that TAs are actually going to demand that girls be subjected to genital inspections. If they don’t get their way in blocking these bills, I fully expect TAs to make exactly this demand. I also think this is letting a bit of projection slip. They think their opponents are plotting to do this because it’s what they themselves are planning to demand. It’s a scare tactic designed to make girls and their parents back down in their fight to protect the rights and health of girls and women.

The simple presentation of a birth certificate would completely circumvent the need (and threat) of genital inspections, assuming that they have not been changed. As humans cannot change sex, this should not be legally possible, but we’ve seen how there is pressure to enable records to be tampered with in this way. It’s distorting history, and a demand that we play along. Welcome to Minitrue.

On IMDB, there is no longer an entry for Ellen Page, and all her past performances are now credited to “Elliot Page,” even though there was no such person as Elliot Page at the time those movies were made. Would any romantic scenes filmed with Page’s male co-stars now be considered “gay” love scenes? Only if you’re willing to deny reality and have compliantly retconned your own memory. Wherever Page is now in the continuing evolution (or disintigration) of her personality and “identity,” she was not then where she is now, and to pretend otherwise is, to put it plainly, a lie. The first five returns on Google in entering a search for “ellen page academy awards” are for “Elliot.” The oscars.org website has yet to be sanitized, and Ellen’s 2008 win for Juno is still in her original name. I’m not sure if this is the result of an actual commitment to historical integrity, or simply because nobody has gotten around to “fixing” it.

This same demand for compliance with, and acquiescence to dishonesty, is at the core of the push for so-called trans “rights,” including the demand for boys and men to play on girls’s and women’s teams. Reworded truthfully, it’s clear that this effort cannot survive the use of clear, plain language, so distortion, obfuscation, and emotional blackmail are the only tools it has. It may be hidden behind a facade of glitter and rainbows, but looking closely, what we see is the same old male entitlement, as prepared to resort to threats, intimidation, and violence, as it always has been.