@miamidad, @momofthreeboys:
I can understand that concern and I appreciate it, but I think it is also leaving out something, that as uncomfortable as you are with seeing male genitals in the shower, I can almost guarantee you that it is even more uncomfortable for a transgender woman, despite popular notions that transgender women somehow are these exhibitionists, it is directly the opposite, I doubt very much any woman would have to see a transgender woman taking a shower totally nude, they are likely to be more uncomfortable than you guys would be. Likewise, I suspect a transgender male would be very loathe to use a shower in a men’s locker room, besides it being potentially dangerous fpr them. This idea that transgender women who are before surgery would want to ‘display’ themselves is based in something that won’t go on, doing that kind of thing brings attention to them, and that is something almost every transgender person learns early on to avoid. The bathroom isssue is absurd, the locker room issue while I understand the objections, in real life they aren’t going to happen.
Can’t say I have read all ~500 posts on this thread. We have men’s and women’s restrooms (and locker rooms) to divide people into male and female groups based on anatomy (and common decency). Transgendered people are not fetishists, but they are more akin to anorexics. I certainly don’t want my portion size at a restaurant dictated by anorexic sensibilities and I don’t want restroom use determined by whatever gender someone “identifies with.” It is silly that a man, i.e. someone with XY chromosomes and a penis, would be free to roam the female locker room at the YWCA and lounge in the hot tub based on his personal “identity.” He should be free to identify as he wishes, but that is it - the world is not obliged to assist with the delusion. This has nothing to do with “Bible thumpers” or the religious right. It has more to do with 2+2=4, not whatever number the sum identifies as.
As an aside the quickest way to solve the argument us to have a single restroom for all. Once the women had the pleasure, we would be back to separate restrooms - for men and women.
"We have men’s and women’s restrooms (and locker rooms) to divide people into male and female groups based on anatomy (and common decency). "
Whose common decency, and just what is that? More importantly, that ‘common decency’ is not locked in time, people in the early 20th century would consider what people wear to beaches these days obscene, would consider short skirts on women , short hair, tshirts and jeans on men, ‘indecent’ or ‘improper’.
More importantly, we don’t define people by anatomy, when you look at a woman on the street, or a man, you don’t have the ability to know what they have under their clothing, that pretty woman you look at might have been born with M on their birth certificate, that guy might have had an F…and that same person, when they use a facility, would have a hard time using the one their birth certificate at birth might have said they were…so how do you tell? We judge people as male and female by how they present themselves, not by their genitals.
Of course we define people biologically. Where would the women’s movement be without women (or men)? What would a woman be without 2 X chromosomes? How would we reproduce based on “identities” without some reality testing in biology? How does “identity” with a gender at odds with one’s biology differ from a delusion? People are not given arbitrary M’s and F’s on their birth certificates as a cruel or random joke. Their gender is determined by their biology, just like hair color but less easily changed.
Those are meant as rhetorical questions. I don’t mean to get sucked into the rabbit hole (assuming the organism identifies as a rabbit) - just expressing my views.
The most important is to understand that we are not important. Once you understand that, you will find the place where you still could be yourself. I already did, where I will live 50% of the time when I retire. I will never be in the same locker with somebody who has other body parts and may not be a transgender at all, might be just a straight man wnjoying himself with all these naked women around him. It is also an assumption that most are comfortable taking shower being dressed. There is no point in shower if you cannot undress yourself. Just do not use shower, just stop going to these places…easy
and
It would really help if posters stop creating a false narrative that is really meant for the uniformed. It is starting to come off as willful deception. Just read the posts on this thread, and it is obvious they know better, as many have pointed this very fact out many, many times.
It is frankly very disingenuous 1) to keep insisting this is about just bathroom and stalls and 2) to insist that transgenders because they identify with the other gender always try to look and mimic that gender. Both of these conditions that posters keep latching onto as the basis of their arguments are flat-out falsehoods.
Case-in-point: The two cases I know of in my area involved a transgender wanting use the school’s female communal locker room with communal showers etc. The school said no because it was a full-blown anatomical teenage boy wanting to do this. The second case was at a local business which also had a similar communal locker room set-up. And in that case, the transgender was told to use the complete unisex bathroom and shower. These examples are par for the course and are not just limited to bathroom stalls.
I suspect that these types of cartoons that stereotypically depict transgenders as always wanting to look like the other gender will fall on deaf eyes and ears. Oh really, all transgenders dress and act like that? Thanks for informing everyone of that. I wonder what posters would say if others linked to cartoons depicting other groups in a stereotypical fashion? We could imagine the uproar about being offensive etc.
And to portray this issue as only about bathrooms will also fail miserably because people are realizing that there are men who still look and act like men that want to walk into female areas under the guise, as one poster put it, “They should be able to use any [facility] they feel like on a given day.” Such honesty is actually quite refreshing. And I took liberty to change “bathroom” to "facility’ because given the poster’s “no compromise” position, the statement about transgender access to female areas cannot be limited to bathrooms, because limiting it to bathrooms would be a compromise.
Therefore, it would be much more useful if posters would just admit that there are adult anatomical men who think there is some civil right to be nude in front minor anatomical females and adult females without any care or concern for how these females feel and no requirement for consent from the females to be viewed nude by the opposite sex. Think about that - no matter how offended the females may feel or react, no matter how disturbing it may be to minor females, no transgender seemingly cares about the effect on them - so much for the sisterhood and caring about other females.
And this is the real issue - even an atheist and agnostic can figure out that there is something extremely weird for an anatomical male to think that the above is OK. (Same goes for an adult anatomical female being around little boys and adult men in a locker room)
Trans people are akin to anorexics!!???!!! Anorexia is a disorder. Trans men and women do not have a disorder.
They are not delusional either.
I hope everyone watched ‘All The Way’ about LBJ trying to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. All one needed to do was replace black people with LBGQT and see how nothing has changed regarding the arguments used then with those used today.
Who said anorexia was a disorder? You could (must) argue that anorexics are not disordered. They simply identify as thin people (or perhaps not thin enough people). Some anorexics are troubled by those feelings but many just want to be left alone and not bullied into gaining weight by male-dominated cultural norms.
And the businesses will figure out rather quickly that they cannot survive and the choice is there is to take. That is what happened in my area.
The one business realized that 40% of the adult members were no longer going to let their kids in the place and, walla, policy changed back to normal pronto and transgender has to use the unisex bathroom and shower.
The good part about boycotts is they can work both ways.
The people will still be serviced in that all this will do is create the rise of private clubs where only known and referred family and friends can join.
(Emphasis mine)
^ you compared trans people with anorexia and anorexia is a diagnosable disorder and can be life threatening.
Some people identify with anorexia and would like to be recognized as legitimate, not demonized.
Of course, anorexia is a disorder. I think you are missing my point. The fact that a person has, in fact, genotypic and phenotypic characteristics but believes or “identifies” that he is truly something else - well, who am I to argue but he is not what he thinks he is.
If he thinks he is God we would call that a religious delusion. If he thinks he is fat but weights 87 pounds we would call that anorexia. If he thinks he is of the opposite sex and desires to live his life that way…
At some point, we are what we are, not what we wish to be. Compassion is good, but re-writing reality to conform to a person’s distorted belief is not compassionate, just mistaken.
“I think you are missing my point.”
No, I’m not. You’ve made yourself perfectly clear.
Pot, please meet kettle. Talk about being disingenuous!
I believe that trans people should be able to use the bathroom that is most appropriate to their gender identity for reasons I’ve already stated but well… being trans does involve a disorder. If you are born with the body of a man and feel that you are fundamentally a woman, requiring (in many cases) various medical and/or surgical interventions, it is hard to see how that isn’t some form of health condition.
That being said, there are two key differences between anorexia and gender dysphoria. One, there is some evidence that the “beliefs” of trans people are supported by certain biological factors, even if not by chromosomes or anatomical presentation – it isn’t entirely in their heads.
Second, even to the extent that the two are parallel, in the case of anorexia, accepting the person’s subjective reality, in which they are overweight and must continue abstaining from food, is likely to be fatal. In the case of trans people, attempts in earlier decades to cure gender dysphoria were pretty universally unsuccessful, while there are plenty of people around to testify that being permitted to live their lives according to the gender they identified with resulted in full and happy lives. So in medical terms, this has become the preferred, and currently only viable “treatment” for the “disorder.”
^^^^Can’t read that article without subscribing. I do see, however, that it is an op-ed piece.
I wonder if @WISdad23 is a doctor or research scientist (no need to answer this) because he implicitly draws the analogy that I knew from the start of this thread. However, I realized that the vast majority of posters seem to only know the couple science studies that purport to support their ideology, so I just decided not to even post this info. But, since the topic has now been raised, it should be noted that anorexia and transgender-ism do share a common psychiatric disordered trait.
According to the American College of Pediatricians and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V), anorexia has some very relevant company, as it pertains to this thread.
From an upcoming paper to be published this summer, re children who think they are transgender:
And as noted by the former chair of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins:
The aforementioned pediatricians go on to say something rather damning to the politics of transgender push with regards to little kids and older minors.
Let me guess, posters are now going to call these two groups of scientists, American College of Pediatricians and American Psychiatric Association, as well as Dr. McHugh, the two latest hate groups and hater re transgenders.
Therefore, unlike what one poster said a couple pages back, the jury is still way, way out there in terms of understanding all this from a science perspective and couple studies does not change, overnight, the wealth of information gained beforehand.
(All emphases mine)
When did being transgender become not seriously life threatening?
[Quote]
Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBTQ – affirming countries.11 What compassionate and reasonable person would condemn young children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88% of girls and 98% of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health?
http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-ideology-harms-children
I’ve only recently begun reading more than superficially about the transgender status. I’m on the fence about it being a disorder. Since so many transgender individuals feel a great deal of distress about the fact that their anatomy doesn’t match their identity, I can see that it might be called a disorder.
From what I’ve read, it most definitely is a matter of the transgender person’s brain-it certainly isn’t a “choice” that is made. For that reason, I have a great deal of trouble accepting certain peoples’ insistence that it has anything to do with “wrongdoing,” character, sin, or integrity. It apparently is heavily influenced by hormonal activity at the 6th month of pregnancy, well after anatomical sex characteristics have been determined.
Because counseling has been shown to be completely inadequate in convincing a transgender person that their gender identity is “wrong,” and allowing them to present as their preferred gender seems to give them great relief, I land on the side of supporting the transgender male or female in taking whatever action makes them resolve the mind/body conflict.
I’d also be willing to be that part of the reason transgender individuals may not find that their chosen intervention relieves their anguish is because they are still marginalized by society, bullied, made fun of, and rejected. Most humans have a deep seated need to be accepted, and if a transgender person does not receive acceptance and is in fact completely rejected, I could see how hormonal treatment, surgery, and other methods they use in order to present as their preferred gender would fall short in completely resolving their pain.
All that said, if my child told me she believed she was actually male, I fully admit it would probably be very difficult for me to accept and sort out. It would generate many emotions; shock, confusion, heartache, denial. I think it would be a difficult journey to total acceptance and understanding. But I also realize it would be my responsibility to work through those emotions, educate myself completely about this, and eliminate any kind of judgmental point of view.
I recently read the book Becoming Nicole, and in so doing, realized how little I actually knew and understood about transgender people. I knew nothing of the biological seeds which are sown in utero that are completely separate and apart from the intellectual.
I still have a long way to go to understand it totally, and as already admitted, would have to admit to not being 100% comfortable with it if it were my child. But it’s also no big deal to me if a transgender female uses the same bathroom or locker room with me. I don’t look at other women in the changing room. I pretty much keep my eyes averted, protect my own modesty while changing, and basically go about my happy way.