Exactly. Every interview or trans story I’ve ever read, is basically the same. Person is born the wrong gender, they start therapy and hormones, then have surgery to make them look more like the gender they feel they belong to, change their name and try to live their lives as the opposite sex. From what I’ve seen, trans women want to be treated and referred to as woman and vice versa. Trying to live their lives as quietly and normally as everyone else.
But it’s like you alluded to earlier, it’s now no longer about that at all and more about victim points. I genuinely believe that there are now a lot of people who are not trans and posing as such for attention and to be part of debates like the one in the video. These are also the same people that fight for all these unnecessary pronouns!
The thing about being trans is it wasn’t even possible 100 years ago, unless you were born intersex, which was treated as what it is until about ten years ago: a biological exception/aberration. (Funny how about 15 years ago when I was studying psychology and we were being taught about the various sexual/chromosomal conditions one can be born in, the issue of trans still hadn’t come up and things like intersex were not discussed as anything but what they are: genetic variations affecting an entirely miniscule portion of the population, correctly treated by textbooks and professors as minor footnotes to other genetic variations/disorders that affect much greater percentages of the population)
Meanwhile, homosexuality has been documented as long as we have records of human society.
You tell me which has an actual important root in human psychology and which is an artifact of modern societal conditions and technology.
Simply not the case. This article took me all of 15 seconds to find.
I don’t give a fuck about how they present it. People are people. Some are shitty, some are nice and most are just trying to live their lives the best way they can. Which is the original point I was trying to make. You don’t have to memorize a new gender chart, that’s ridiculous. But you should be respectful of people. It costs you nothing to be kind. You don’t have to be a cunt all the time.
This just isn’t true, and certainly isn’t at the societal level. There is a major, massive societal cost to opening up all kinds of unimportant cans of worms.
I make a similar argument with the Cataluña matter here in Spain: in a country with so many massive problems, where just a few years ago over 50% of the people under age 25 were ninis (not studying or working), why focus our energies on such a niche issue? That argument remains valid, and think how valid it is when you consider that the niche group directly involved in that issue is about 200x larger than that affected by the ‘trans’ issue.
To continue my metaphor from before, that is that a basic principle of the brain’s perception is to sort out what’s important/useful to our survival and what isn’t, what would the cost be if we all of a sudden started perceiving colors and shapes in a way so as to be attentive to tons of inputs that are not at all useful or important to us, or are only useful in the .01% of cases? Do you really think there’s no cost to that?
" With most mammals, however, the majority of individuals are cisgender male or female; transgender individuals are estimated to comprise about 0.3% of the adult U.S. population."
As I said, it’s a clear-cut scientific issue. To muddy the waters and say it isn’t is non-scientific.
Oh do you have a bored housewife? Buy her an exercise bike to give her something to strive for and achieve, look how emotional and happy she is and how far she has come. “Gift that gives back” yeah you can sit on the sofa and she can thankyou for buying her a bike and now shes all hot and skinny for you.
Haha
Honestly most adverts follow the stupid dad line of attack, and that’s perfectly acceptable and safe to do because twitter wont moan about it too much…the advert is fine, people love to find sexism in everything, then post it to twitter for likes and shares.
So 1 in 300 people have brains that experience thought paterns of the opposite gender. Your conflating that because the condition is rare it means it’s not scientific, which wouldn’t be the case
Ignoring the extremes you might see in the most radical discourse, the general ask of us cis gender people is to try to be respectful of their preferred pronouns. So if in doubt, just plumping for “they” over something gender specific. Or if they specify, going with he or she, even if you think that she or he is more appropriate (delete as appropriate)
How fucking minor is that? There’s no can of worms, no massive cost to you personally, no major change needed on your part. It’s basically a tiny extension of “live and let live”, just call someone he/she/they according to what they’d prefer.
This is just one example that I feel illustrates my point, before it seems like I’m picking on one religion, but I’ve always thought that the Islamic practice of fasting is a bit stupid. I fully understand the reasons behind it, but I just think it’s a bit stupid and unhealthy to abstain from food and drink for waking hours, especially during heatwaves, which I’ve seen my former classmates do. But even if I think it’s stupid or illogical, I appreciate that it means a great deal to people I interact with every day, so I refrain from telling them that I think it is pointless, and I also make an effort not to go and buy a fat munch at lunch time and then sit at my desk right in front of them and eat it. Instead I’ll take it off to the communal eating area, because the chance that the tiniest sacrifice from me might make someone else’s day that little bit more bearable makes it well worth doing. I view this as being an inconvenience on the same level as calling someone by what I might not consider to be the right pronoun.
This feels like a tiny accommodation to be making, not a major imposition and not something that will have far reaching implications.
Because despite some of the noise, nobody is expected to remember 39 different pronouns and know exactly which one a person prefers to use the first time they meet them. This isn’t aimed at you specifically at all, but so often I feel like people disingenuously act like people are asking this of them, when it just isn’t true.
Also, at the end of the day, I never ever ever interact with trans people. It just isn’t something that happens in my day to day, so if I feel like it’s just too big of an issue in media or online, I just don’t read the articles, I don’t follow those people in social media, and my life goes on. I’m genuinely intrigued by people who act like Vice articles about trans issues are a major imposition on their lives, how about just don’t fucking read the articles and don’t follow those outlets/influencers.
Im woke as fuck but I just don’t read those articles or follow those people, because I don’t think there’s a need, and I’m not hugely interested. It therefore doesn’t dominate my feeds or my discourse. Isn’t it that simple, at the end of the day? Maybe I’m guilty of extrapolating from my own anecdotal evidence, but my life has not ever been negatively impacted by a trans person making demands of me, and ultimately, I’d bet the same is the same for ninety percent of people who are online complaining about the societal costs of something as simple as calling someone what they want to be called.
There is a dual falacy in that imo.
He/she/they are third person pronoun and most often the only pronoun in effect during conversation with a trans or any person is ‘You’ which is a gender neutral pronoun anyway.
It also doesn’t help with the bid for acceptance.
But anyway you are right. It only dominates someone’s timelines if they have kept on pursuing this topic and in real life it doesn’t matter one bit.
No, I am not saying that intersex is not an actual thing. What’s unscientific is when it starts getting talked about anything other than what it is; an abnormality, a genetic divergence from the overwhelming norm.
For comparison, somewhere from 1 to 8 in 300 have schizophrenia. A disorder which is in many ways a more serious condition and disadvantage than being intersex. How much do we hear about schizophrenic rights and respect/treatment of schizophrenic people versus trans rights?
I have no problem with referring to a person by the gender they identify with. I do have a problem with the devolution of language to avoid irritating people’s very, very fine skin.
Apples and oranges honestly. You could take your metaphor even further: I think believing in God is rather stupid, but every day I am extremely respectful of people who hold this belief, I am great friends with them, and I even have sex with them. Now, when people who believe in God ask me if I believe in God, or if I am religious, or if I go to church, or if I would baptise my children, I tell them no. Very rarely in my experience does this represent a problem for our interaction/friendship. No offence is taken, no grand appeals for me to change my ways are made. When they are, in the case of the typical bible thumper or street preacher, I ignore them, and if they are particularly invasive, I can be mildly rude in telling them to stop badgering me.
Now, do we have a similar case with the trans? No. We are talking about people who are extremely reactive and quick to take offense. If I tell them that I feel that this modern fad of extreme, absurdist level political correctness where we must use long, hamfisted labels like cis gender male instead of just “male”, or “straight”, or “gay”, or “bi”, or “trans”, the reaction is not live and let live, is it? It’s, you are an arsehole, you lack respect, you are highly offensive, or even, what you’ve just said should be against the law, I have a RIGHT to be referred to in the way I tell you I want to be referred to.
Well no, life just isn’t like that. I would love to be referred to as a legendary footballer or a great writer but I am neither. There are times in my life I would’ve loved to be gay, or a woman, and there are times in a gay man’s life or in a woman’s life where they probably would love to be straight, or a man, but ultimately…
Regarding the societal cost of making wholescale changes to society and language on the basis of the desires of an extremely miniscule community, or the societal cost of allowing people to feel that they have a right to feel offended or even think that society somehow should guarantee them the right to not be offended, I’ll probably save you that speech, as it probably gets a bit more philosophical than is needed or wanted or appropriate for a football forum haha.
A religious person expecting you to also be religious because they are is, in my opinion, more alike a trans person asking you to be trans yourself. When they aren’t, they’re asking you to just acknowledge that they are, which is more akin to a religious person expecting you to be accepting of the fact that they are religious.
The point is they know perfectly well I don’t share the same beliefs as they do, that I even strongly disagree with beliefs they hold, and it is not an issue. This is what live and let live is about. It is not about the way the way many of these people carry themselves. It runs contradictory to what victim culture is about, actually. It is not about forcing people to speak in a certain way just because they want you to. No one compels me to say respectful things about God, just as no one should compel me to use silly speech that there is no need for.
