You seem to believe there is some magic measure of nanograms per decilitre of testosterone that nicely divides genders. There isn’t. It doesn’t exist.
Hormones don’t measure gender, identity does.
The harm from these laws is not limited to the specific trans women who are denied the chance to play sports. The fact that you are trying to limit the analysis of the harm in this way is very problematic.
2 Likes
Nope. But you seem to be highly adept at reading whatever you want into other people’s posts.
OK, so you are going with the first definition? Thanks for clearing that up. Hopefully you can see that not everyone else is.
My analysis was not meant to be exhaustive. Feel free to throw that in as well. I still the work needs to be shown.
I think your post illustrates the main problem with this topic. When two people are talking about “trans women in sports” in general terms, they almost certainly have different ideas of trans women (and sports for that matter) in mind.
It’s even harder when people like clovis suggest that even attempting to clarify these things is offensive.
2 Likes
But it’s not just the tiny fraction of potential trans athletes that are hurt by all of this. Trans youth hear these discussions and they internalize that they are not valuable and they’re disposable. It doesn’t just hurt the potential athletes. Having to hear these theoretical transgender debates all of the time where trans people are villainous and disposable causes real harm to all transgender people.
9 Likes
First, just to be clear, this is not an argument I’m espousing. I’m just describing it to show why Clovis’ appeal to “amount of harm” is hard to win.
Secondly, as I said above, I wasn’t intending my analysis to be exhaustive. Surely, there is harm to the each member of the trans community (at some level that is less than a what a trans athlete experiences). Also as Jonny points out, discriminating in this way likely even causes harm to non-trans people. All of those things should go into the calculation.
But when you add those, and any other factors you can think of, you’re still stuck with the 0.5%, and that makes any appeals to aggregate harm hard to convincingly make. Morality based appeals are superior as they don’t suffer from this weakness.
Cis women are not being raped and murdered, nor are they committing suicide at twice the national rate, for getting second in their chosen sport.
This is the easiest utilitarian argument ever.
The issue is that 99.9% of people “trying to clarify this” are being offensive to start with, and are at very least prioritising their concerns about corner cases over the real, immediate, and ongoing harm that trans people experience. So dismissing those concerns out of hand is far closer to the right position than the concerns themselves.
3 Likes
OK, Mr. Utilitarian. Let’s flesh this out a little bit.
-
If 0.5% of trans people is enough for the aggregate harm to be greater by prohibiting trans women from competing in women, then what percentage would the number of trans people have to drop to, for the calculation to go the other way?
-
Are you really suggesting that if we allow trans women into women’s sports, they will no longer be vicitmized at greater levels than cis women? That seems a bit naive. I’m certainly they will still be victims of rape and murder at much higher levels than cis women. Maybe there will be a drop? But how much? And how did you arrive at that?
To amplify this point, and why im so strident here. These debates do not happen in a vacuum. The ongoing context is that most of the people making the same arguments about controls are actively harming trans kids in word and deed.
So when you join that debate with anything other than a full defence of trans kids and their rights, you are standing by or tacitly supporting that harm.
3 Likes
I’d don’t know about 99.9%, but it’s probably up there.
But if bolded is your position, it would seem that productive discussion is nearly impossible.
I’m suggesting we don’t need laws criminalizing being trans.
I agree. But I would agree with that even there existed exactly one trans person. You, with your utilitarian perspective, would not.
Tyson sucked and won because of weak competition. He got beat until he had to bite by a blown up light heavyweight and he was no challenge at all to the best fighter of the era - Lennox Lewis, who Don King paid off not to fight Tyson.
2 Likes
I’m gonna hard disagree on bolded. Poking at bad arguments in defense of trans causes in spaces like this helps those who are making them think about ways to make them even better and more convincing. This will help when the topic comes in a place that matters more than shitposting on unstuck.
1 Like
I said closer to right. This forum is one of the rare cases where i will have the debate in full.
Most of the time in social media its mainly a failing battle to try and make the space a little less unsafe for trans people.
This is through telling transphobes to STFU, pointing and laughing at them and then telling trans people that they are awesome and welcome in my sport.
1 Like
I’m a little out of date in that regard. I have virtually no social media use. Half the reason I frequent unstuck is so I can hear about the crazy things people post on social media.
Okay. Lets work through the anologies.
If i join a debate on police shootings and the first thing i do is bring up justified shootings, how would you feel?
Add in that the toxicity of online spaces causes direct harm to trans kids, so its like if your point around police shootings was going to make them more likely to happend
There are trans people in every online space you participate in. You should be posting with them in mind.
You can absolutely make your points on corner cases (as i have done here) AFTER prioritising their defence first and if the audience seems receptive.
4 Likes
Yeah. Ive quit facebook. FB seemed to find every article in the world about trans folks in rugby and show it to me.