Guest post: The sun AND the moon
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on He has never used the toilets.
I made it just about as far into this, before realizing I hadn’t clipped my fingernails for a while. I just find it odd that the BBC, which has produced some fine skeptical programmng in the past, doesn’t have someone investigate this social phenomenon to explore what it means to experience a mismatch between their gender and their sex at birth. This is an extraordinary claim that is to be taken at face value, and they’ve no mind to say “wait, what does this really mean and how can we know that this is what is really happening?” We can’t even get a grip on how someone can experience a gender identity, let alone one that is counter to a person’s sex.
Okay, we know it’s socially influenced to believe that if a boy is “sugar and spice and everything nice” then he must be a girl, or a girl who is “snakes and snails and puppy dog tails” must be a boy. But, why does the BBC just let this all pass as a valid natural phenomenon that must be acknowledged, recognized, and catered to?
It’s either, or, and, something, as Laurie Penny let slip (again.) It’s fixed enough to castrate and plastically alter a body, to snatch the available supplies of HRT from the chemist’s shelves so that post-menopausal women don’t have access, it’s fixed enough that a woman must accept that her partner is now a woman and accommodate all his demands or be shunned, but then again it’s a floating thing for the genderqueer and they can’t explain how the’re in boy mode today but girl mode tomorrow but you better accommodate it!
This kid is being offered the sun and the moon, but it’s not good enough. Only the 2nd LaGrange point will work, or she’ll wait until she gets home!
And any resulting urinary tract infections (or worse) will be the fault of cisheteronormativity. And TERFs.
Wow! The evils of cisherteronormativity are clearly many and manifest, but who knew that TERFs have even bacteria at their disposal. Diabolical!
If Felix was refusing to use any of the toilet facilities being offered because she was extremely germ phobic, it would be pitiable, but would be being handled in a completely different manner that would not have made it to national media. At least germ phobia has some basis in reality (i.e. germs are indeed everywhere), unlike Felix’s belief that she is somehow the other sex/gender/whatever. One belief is treated, the other indulged and celebrated. Plumbing is designed around sexed bodies, not immaterial “gender identities.” Whatever is happening in Felix’s head, the porcelain and pipes don’t give a shit about where and how Felix gives hers.