Using concrete, factual language
At Inside Higher Ed Angie Kirk, an English professor and former college athlete, explains what fair competitive sports policy would look like:
In the past year, legislators in several states have introduced or passed bills that would ban persons who are biologically male from competing on women’s sports teams…These bills are in contradiction to President Biden’s executive order regarding athletics, which overturned Trump-era policies prohibiting genetically male individuals from competing on women’s teams, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s recent policy change allowing each sport to make its own rules.
It’s pathetic that Trump is right about this and Biden is wrong, but that’s where we are. (No, no, exclaim the Folx Brigade, it’s YOU that’s wrong. No YOU, I reply. ∞)
To put a face to the damage caused by biological males infiltrating women’s competitive sports, consider the experience of Connecticut high school runner Selina Soule, along with her female peers. Soule lost the opportunity in 2019 to compete for a spot in the New England Regional Championships in the 55-meter dash because two biological males with gender dysphoria (a biological male feeling or desiring to be female) competed in her event and came in ahead of her.
We don’t actually know the two males had or have gender dysphoria. It’s kind of an odd coincidence, two boys in the same school in the same sport…which is to say I don’t believe it, myself.
Kirk goes on to set out the issues the way people who are not bewitched by trans ideology understand them, and to argue for clarity and accuracy of language in discussing them.
For example, the title of the most recent legislation in Florida, the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, puts in the forefront the reality it hopes to highlight and uses terms factually. We need to use concrete, factual language whenever possible and note when others are and are not. Factually, we are discussing individuals who are biologically male but who believe or wish themselves to be female, with or without the use of drugs. Labeling them as such, as biological males who believe or wish themselves to be sexed female, or as biological males with gender dysphoria, is vastly different than calling these individuals transgender women.
It is indeed. Men who wish they were women are still men, and there are many compelling reasons not to lose sight of that fact.
A Daily Kos staffer called Marissa Higgins throws the usual mudpies.
As Daily Kos has continued to highlight, state-level lawmakers have really come out against trans folks over the last few years.
Getting the “folks” in early, just in case the title isn’t clear enough. (
English professor fired off a vehemently anti-trans op-ed in a big news outlet.)
Republicans across the nation have pushed a variation of the same anti-trans bills to see what they can get away with—
Just the kind of obfuscation Angie Kirk points out. The bills aren’t “anti-trans.” They’re pro rights for girls and women. It’s not persecution of trans people to preserve women’s sports for women. It gets extremely boring having to repeat this endlessly, but clearly that’s where we are.
Unfortunately, whether or not these bills are actually signed into law, giving these anti-trans, discriminatory, exclusionary perspectives prime time space does make some people feel validated in their transphobia. We shouldn’t be debating whether trans kindergarteners should be playing sports with their friends—it’s a pandemic, and that’s foolish and inhumane, anyway. And yet—perhaps emboldened by Republican rhetoric, perhaps not—people are spewing their views and recycling anti-trans language day in and day out. And as is the case in a recent op-ed appearing in Inside Higher Education, they’re getting major platforms for offensive, inaccurate speech.
So, that’s the level of fairness, accuracy, argument, civility we get from the trans activist side.
There’s a lot more but it doesn’t get any better, so that’s enough.
H/t Sackbut
It has been truly startling to see formerly sharp sceptics claim that gender dysphoria / gender identity / etc. are things that can be confirmed objectively – by asking the person in question what their gender identity is. This constitutes objective proof of trans / queer identities, because it is objective fact that the person made that claim. In gender theory, there is now no difference between ‘claim was made’ and ‘claim is true’; a total abdication of all scepticism.
We shouldn’t be debating whether trans kindergarteners should be playing sports with their friends—it’s a pandemic, and that’s foolish and inhumane, anyway.
So is it the debating, the playing sports, or the pandemic that’s “foolish and inhumane”? I honestly can’t tell what that means. Maybe if I were a TRA I’d nod in solemn agreement but I’m not, and at my age I can’t hear dogwhistles anyway.
Holms — in fairness, the sufficiency of self-reporting is how I reply to the theists’ challenge “we can’t prove god exists but you can’t prove that you love your wife so tu quoque!” A thought is a brain state, which is not externally verifiable, so I think we pretty much have to accept that people think what they say they think. If they say they think they’re the opposite gender, I’m willing to grant that they really do think so. If they actually want a conversation, I can ask them what they mean by “gender”, how they define “delusion”, and how far they think we should be expected to go to accommodate theirs.
That said, there are certainly additional factors that might lead me to doubt their self-report. Is a man with a history of sexual abuse of women now claiming to be a woman himself, and demanding access to women-only spaces? Now I think I get to say, pull the other one.
Sex Matters has just released a paper called ‘principles for clarity and respect’ which does seem to deal well with both clarity and respect. It presents an interesting and objective definition of ‘trans’, something I’ve never seen before:
‘Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights recognises the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence. Thus individuals have the right not to be forced to routinely declare or have recorded personal information about them (including name, sex, date of birth and so on), apart from where this is justified – for example by national security, public safety, the prevention of disorder or crime, the protection of health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
It was a legal case based on this right to information privacy that gave rise to the Gender Recognition Act 2004.
Thus, transgender people are people who wish to exercise this right – they are people who do not wish to disclose their sex or have it acknowledged or discussed.
Considering the right in this way frames the human rights of people who identify as transgender without recourse to sex stereotypes (such as clothing and make-up).’
It then goes on to point out:
‘It is not logically possible to access a space governed by sex-based rules while also demanding that information about your sex remain undisclosed.’
I hope the ideas in this paper get picked up by people who make law and policy.
“It’s pathetic that Trump is right about this and Biden is wrong, but that’s where we are.” Not only is Biden stupid about this, Kamala still has pronouns in her twitter bio. Still, these SJWokester pandering morons are so far and away better than Donnie Dipshit that it really illustrates by contrast how awful he is. I hope Donnie does run in 2024, just so I can see him get beaten by these mediocre excuses for Democrats. The political cycle of ‘reverse everything your predecessor did’ is lame, dull, and lazy. I miss Obama. :(
Trans Kindergartners? Are those first graders who identify as Kindergartners?
But anyway, when our kids were that age teams weren’t segregated by sex. At that age there aren’t really any salient physical differences between the sexes.
Peter N, I can accept that a person feels a certain way, but I can reject the interpretation of that feeling. In much the same way that I would when a christian tells me they have on several occasions felt the literal presence of God as he walked alongside the person. I don’t dispute that the person felt awe, reverence, that sort of thing, but I do take issue with the interpretation that such feelings are a literal manifestation and proof of god.
This can be applied to trans people’s internal feelings too. They may feel a certain way, but that is a long way from proving that there is an internal gender identity.