If I was going to write an essay on this question I’d probably go on in this manner, and argue that the current anti-trans agenda raises some challenges which need to be discussed, but (whether people want it to be or not) it is being hijacked by the right wing to make it an anti-(gay, lesbian, woman, queer, non-straight sex roles), etc movement. This debate seems to be proposing state intervention to curtail people’s liberty, and hence should be considered carefully. It could also be said to attack people who are vulnerable in our society, even while it is supposed to protect them, as it says they should not exist.
Feel free to respond, after all I can’t be in favour of discussion if I don’t allow it.
[Stuff in [brackets] was added later]
Introduction: The suppression of sex and gender variety
Everywhere around the world today women, feminists, gays, lesbians and transgender people are being attacked, by those who hold that only purely straight ‘masculine men’ and ‘feminine women’, and the power and conceptual structures built around those categories and their relationships, should exist.
At the Australian version of the US based CPAC Conference, Conservative Australian politicians were agitating for their right to assign pronouns to people in the way that they want to consider accurate, along with opposition to having a formal aboriginal ‘voice’ to Parliament, celebrating the fact that moderate conservatives lost their seats in the last Australian election and claiming that climate change is a scientist’s conspiracy to cause society to collapse. This makes it relatively clear that listening to despised minorities is not part of their conservative way. These are also the people who would have stopped gay marriage, and who have encouraged religions to discriminate against gay and lesbian people.
At the same time Vladimir Putin used an anti-trans, anti-gay, argument to justify annexing parts of Ukraine, as it was necessary to protect the motherland from these horrors. He apparently said:
Do we really want perversions that lead to degradation and extinction to be imposed on children in our schools from the primary grades? To be drummed into them that there are various supposed genders besides women and men, and to be offered a sex change operation? Do we want all this for our country and our children?
Riley Putin Claims U.S. Wants to Push Gender “Perversions” on Russian Youth. metroweekly 11 October 2022
[This was followed by a Russian law forbidding any act which could be regarded as an attempt to promote “non-traditional sexual relations” whether in film, online, advertising or in public. So orthodoxy about male and female gender categories, is easily expanded to include anti-gay and lesbian positions – which is possibly the intention.]
There also seems to be a massive movement in the US to enforce gender categories and ‘gender purism’. This seems to want to make sure that all women are proper subservient, non-feminist women who would never object to anything men propose, and that everyone should be sexually straight. Men are all the one thing and women are completely different. After all, in these definitions, lesbians are not real women (as they don’t desire sex with men and are supposedly all ‘butch’) , gays are not real men (as they don’t desire sex with women and are supposedly all effeminate), and children need parents of the ‘opposite’ sexes – anything else is counted as child abuse by them. However, this is clearly dismissing the violence against children that can occur in normal heterosexual families. It also seems that homosexuality is linked, by the same people, with pedophilia and bestiality. I know little about bestiality, but it would seem observable that most pedophilia involves ‘godly men’ often conservatives, people in other organisations for children organised by supposedly straight men, and family members known by the children. So it would seem that these compulsory sex role people are deliberately putting recognition of the real likely pedophilic culprits to one side. There is, likewise, no evidence I have seen that Transgender people have a marked role, or even a role, in child trafficking. It is another example of ‘loyal category’ thinking ‘as ‘when people think people they classify as being unlike them must be evil and those like them must be honorable and assert that someone like Donald Trump is anti-pedophile, when the little evidence we have suggests exactly the opposite.
There is lots of action to make us straight. Apparently, in the US:
Nearly 670 anti-LGBTQ bills have been filed since 2018, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the American Civil Liberties Union and LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans, with nearly all of the country’s 50 state legislatures all having weighed at least one bill.
Lavietes and Ramos Nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ bills filed in 2022 so far, most of them targeting trans people. NBC News, 20 March 2022
Some researchers have said that their research shows that:
Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault
Transgender people over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime 23 March 2021
Then you seem to have people devoted to to establish women’s guilt as in the current Depp Heard case, and now apparently in the Pitt Jolie case. Nothing to do with trans or gayness but a lot to do with enforcing sex/gender categories and gender righteousness. This hostility towards non-compliant women, may also be fed by the so-called ‘incel’ movement, which also seems relatively hostile to gay people as well as women.
[Two weeks after writing this, I read about a Federal Republican Bill to:
prohibit.. the use of federal funds to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10. The bill prohibits federal funds from being used to host or promote events where adults dance salaciously or strip for children…. [This includes] any topic involving sexual orientation, gender identity, gender dysphoria, or related subjects. … radical [ie non completely straight] gender theory.
Congressman Mike Johnson House Republicans Introduce Legislation to Ensure Taxpayer Dollars Cannot Fund Sexually Explicit Material for Children. October 18, 2022
[As other people have remarked.
Universities, public schools, hospitals, medical clinics, etc. could all be defunded if they host any event discussing LGBTQ people and children could be present. The way they define “sexually oriented material” simply includes anything about LGBTQ people.
Alejandra Caraballo twitter October 19 2022
[The bill grants people the right to sue if their child is exposed to prohibited material in a way that involves federal funding “in whole or in part,” further dampening any discussion.
[This Bill cannot become law until after the November elections, but it indicates where the ‘only straight gender campaign’ is likely going. Since then we have seen Republican Governor of Florida DeSantis crack down on trans people, and gays and lesbians, and indeed forbid colleges to even talk about people being gay. He has now threatened to crush all ‘leftism’. This is about generating conformity and fear.]
We also know that the suicide rate among LGBTQI+ people is high [1] [2]. I use the collective because it seems common, amongst those young people I know, to blend everything together, and because the right seems actively hostile to all of them and also blends them altogether. It appears the main cause of suicide probably stems from attacks, laws and insistence that they are not acceptable because they do not match totally separate gender categories.
The Left Reacts by more suppression
On the whole the Left’s reaction to this real attack on gender freedom, feminism and non-heterosexuality seems to have been to suppress discussion of some real questions around transgender issues.
There are persistent claims, which seem born out by casual observation, that it is impossible to discuss problems around transgender in left-inclined media. However, after about 10 mins research, I’m not entirely sure this is correct [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]. However, it is much asserted, and may mean the discussion is not visible, or that people are not directed to this discussion, or avoid the discussion.
We are also all aware of the ways that people such as JK Rowling have suffered “pile on attacks” online and elsewhere for daring to try and talk about problems of gender and transgender. Often this is reported by the right wing media who are pushing sexual straightness and the evil of trans and gay people. However, this does not mean all such reports are completely wrong. People on the left cannot assume that because some objectors are uncomfortable about some gender issues that these objectors have nothing important to say, or that questions should not be asked. Having looked at the style of writing, it also would not surprise me, if many of these pro-trans writers are right wing trolls, they use very similar language, but we cannot know.
I suspect this apparent reluctance to discuss arises from a general, and probably correct, sense that once the right has got rid of trans or queer people, they will go for gay and lesbian people as well [as is shown by the Bill mentioned above] and then any other people they despise. This certainly seems plausible, but that simply means that rather than not discussing the issues, the issues need to be thought about carefully without allowing the left or the “sexually abnormal” (as the right might say) to be split and made even more vulnerable. The discussions also need to be visible. It also seems to me, that most of the problems which are brought up, are both genuine and completely solvable, by normal means, without having to suppress anyone.
Is this discussion significant?
Some people claim the problem is numerically insignificant and hence trans or gay people can be ignored, but that seems subjective. In Australia right wing politician Mark Latham pointed out that a:
non-binary sex option was marked on the 2021 Census form by just 43,220 respondents or 0.17 per cent of the Australian population…. to listen to the transgender activists and debate in Australia, you would think there are 17 million of them, not 0.17 per cent of the population!
17 million is more than half the population. I’ve not seen anyone claim anything like that, so that’s a bit of rhetorical fantasy. However, there are problems. IF they are such a small percentage of the population, then why bother? Its a trivial problem. Personally, I think 43,000 people marking this section shows this is an issue for a reasonable number of people, while Latham obviously does not, yet worries about it a lot. There are certainly not that many members in his political party. However, the Australian Bureau of Statistics cautioned against using this figure for anything as the question was too badly phrased, and ‘yes’ could have meant too many things.
the results of the census showed that the concept of non-binary sex was “not consistently understood” and was “perceived in different ways by different people”.
About one third of the people who responded explained their response:
These written responses provided some insight into how respondents interpreted the sex question, with three in five referencing gender identities using terms such as “agender, demiboy, gender fluid, non-binary gender and trans woman”.
So the data suggest that there are a significant number of adults (people who would be filling in the census forms) for whom straight gender identity is a problem (and there are probably more who did not fill it in), even if we are not sure in what kind of way binary gender is a problem for them. A Pew survey in the US reported that about 9 out of 10 people knew someone who was gay or lesbian, and 30% of people knew someone who was trans.
So let’s state some clear bases here before we risk further discussion.
- Life is complex, and human social and linguistic categories often do not exhaust the world or fully describe the world, no matter how important those categories are to us. This ‘category failure’ makes some understanding difficult as so many factors are involved, but we can improve categories as we go along. The difficulty is not lessened by calling for the extermination of all who disagree with our category use, as evil, or attempting to associate those people with things we associate with evil such as pedophilia.
- Complexity also considers the context of an argument. Without considering the context, a person may be arguing, or helping to produce, exactly the results they do not want. Lesbians might want protection from men taking over Lesbian spaces, but by fighting trans people, they may be setting up an excuse for others to police the ‘womanhood’ of Lesbians.
- There are three relevant but questionable concepts involved in this issue: ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’.
Sex
Almost everyone agrees that sex is biological, despite some genetic and anatomical variants such as people who have XY chromosomes but are fully female as the male hormones never switched on, there are people who are hermaphrodite some of whom will have been surgically assigned a gender at birth etc. How much relevance people want to give to these variants is a subject of dispute, when we are talking about the population as a whole, but they do exist, and complicate issues of binary sex. While sex is binary and simple in most cases, it is not in all.
Most people on the left would agree that sex is important, even if sometimes hard to define. It would be common to argue that women and others with a history of oppression, may deserve some degree of different treatment to, say, hyper-rich white straight men. Women may need different forms of medical treatment – women may need support during pregnancy and childbearing and there are diseases more likely to emerge if you are one sex or the other, or have some other genetic markers. Statistically women appear to have different signs of heart attack and this should be better known about. Women may need protected spaces to flourish separated from male violence, intimidation, rape and imposition, while protected spaces for men may need rethinking because such spaces have traditionally functioned as ways of excluding women from competence, power and influence. So while equality might be an aim, not everyone, or every process or category, can be treated as ‘the same’ all the time.
This is generalisable. Differential treatment and privilege may be needed to protect some groups, “as long as it does not oppress anyone else”. This question of “as long as a behaviour does not oppress others” is a moral question, which I suspect will always be in dispute and probably should be, as ideas, conventions and behaviour change. It’s not always easy to decide, but it is harmful to avoid the issue, as it is always possible to split more vulnerable groups.
Gender
Most people on the left would also accept that people can be ‘gender fluid’. Gender is not the same as sex, and gender identity may not be the same as sexual identity. The assertion that conventions about sex and gender should always be the same is highly problematic. It also seems highly problematic to assert it is dangerous to society as a whole.
Gender characteristics also seem complicated. We may find that gender characteristics may be distributed statistically by sex, similarly to the way height is. Men are taller than women in general, but many men quite commonly encounter women taller than them. Is this a sign of evil? No. Is a particular man being more ‘maternal’ than a particular woman, evil? I would say not.
We may find that, under most circumstances, most, but not all, women, are relatively non-physically-violent, warmer and more supportive when compared to most, but not all, men and so on. I have found it hard to observe personality traits which are completely exclusive to one sex or the other – they are generally shared to some degree. Both women and men can be close or distant to their children. We are likely to repeatedly encounter statistical variance. The point is to allow people to express an unusual gender identity, as long as (again) it does not oppress others. It’s not acceptable, for example, to assert that because a person identifies as male it’s ok for them to beat those they identify as women, or prevent women from doing mathematics, no matter how traditionally sanctioned this kind of behaviour may be.
As part of liberation, in an ideal world people would be free to be what they want to be, without governments or religions telling them they have to be something else, “as long as this freedom does not oppress others”. It ideally should not, be a problem, if a person’s sex did not completely match with traditional ideas about appropriate gender or sexuality.
Apparently, it did not used to be common for women to want to transition to being men, now it is. It is at least a reasonable hypothesis that some of this urge comes from social insistence that sex and gender are the same. Consequently, young women who want a power and freedom which is still limited by their sex category, or who encounter hostility towards their aims or threats of violence, might decide that life would be less painful if they were male. Just as more gentle, or fashion focused, males might decide they would not be bullied or dismissed if they were female. These problems could arise from the imposition of sex and gender categories, even if the people imposing them, thought they were being real and kind. Hence, paradoxically, acceptance of gender variation (rather than enforcing gender separation) might diminish people wanting ‘the operation’.
At the moment this sexed distribution of characteristics seems unclear. However, potential solutions to problems arising from this distribution, do not usually involve solving height differentials by cutting people’s legs down to size, or building artificial extended legs for others. However, acceptance of variation is not always easy or simple. We can also note that people who don’t have any problem with their sex, can have gender issues, for instance it now seems that women who have time and money to train for sport can develop extremely muscular physiques, which are not usually seen on women, and be berated for not expressing gender conventions or for being unfeminine, ugly or for cheating by using steroids and hence are motivated to quit sport to stop the harassment. It is certainly probable that some are accused of really being male. [There was an example, involving a man berating a nine year old girl with short hair at a sporting event, for not being feminine enough to be a girl]. There seems to be a lot of gender and sexuality enforcing hostility around, and it is not an unreasonable supposition that policing of gender and sex, will lead to policing of women, as for example with genital checks for sport, menstrual checks, or women being beaten up in public toilets for looking too masculine. [We can possibly predict that if if this continues and a woman does not have long carefully tended hair and is not wearing a dress, then the right will come for her, as not beeing femme enough to be a woman.]
Sexuality
Sexuality is also complex. There are many modes of sexuality. People may tend to reduce it to either being gay or straight, and insist people be one or the other, or to assert they value one of these sexualities and do not value the other; but. again, this refuses to recognise ambiguities in many people’s sexuality. Many sexual behaviours are far more confusing than these simple categories suggest. Again the proviso about sexuality is “as long as it does not oppress or harm anyone else and is consensual” – consequently active pedophilia should always be banned (no matter who does it), same as non-pretend rape (although the issue of pretense can clearly be problematic), permanent unconsensual scarring, sexual acts which risk (or cause) the death of others, and so on. The main point is that many people can be bi-sexual, or multi-sexual, rather than mono-sexual in their approach. Hence it is not surprising that some MtF trans people still prefer women, and some FtM prefer men.
There are clearly events which challenge any easy reconciliation within, and between, these categories of sex, gender and sexuality, and what can always be permissible.
We may note that anti-trans people also tend to be in favour of conversion therapy, that is religious oriented therapy, prayers, exorcism, etc, to convert people from gay to straight. While I would not ban it for those who want to try it, there should be some examination of whether it is effective, or whether it drives people from God into suicide.
Trans and categories
Transgender has become one of these areas of difficulty. Some people appear to inherently feel that they are born with the wrong ‘sexed’ body, and may only feel content if they can have a changed body and live the life of the ‘other’ sex. This is relatively common across cultures. Some people have traditionally gone through incredibly painful and dangerous practices to make this change, and may still find they are not accepted by others, as appears to be the case in Indian culture. They may be raped, have difficulty surviving in society or employment, be forced into sex work, marginalised, expelled from their family and communities, and so on. This pain and marginalisation should to be acknowledged if people discussing the issues do want not to increase it. There are other forms of feeling that one is born into the wrong body as well. There are people who are miserable because they have a leg rather than a stump, and who may try to remove their leg to make them feel real, and sometimes real surgery is performed to stop dangerous self damage, and produce some contentment.
However, there are other problems. As, has already been stated, there is a question of whether some people’s transgender issues arise from social and personal enforcing of binary, exclusive and connected categories within sex, gender and sexuality. If so, then when a person’s gender and/or sexuality category does not match their sex category, the sex category may be ‘saved’ by insisting the person is really the ‘other’ sex, rather than accepting that gender and sexuality are complicated. In simple words, people could hold that if you are a ‘butch woman’ or you sexually prefer women, you must really be a man, or if you are a femme male or sexually prefer men, you must really be a woman, rather than allowing you to be complicated and violate categories. Or a person may still have a sexual attraction to women and want to become female, or a woman may have sexual attraction to men and want to become male.
The operation and after therapy etc. could then be performed to save the standard categories (reinforced by the income generated by therapy, surgery etc, as we live in a capitalist society), rather than to always benefit the client. Similarly the insistence that people are really homosexual if they express gender identity issues, could also be an enforcement of binary sexuality.
It is certainly not difficult to imagine that social enforcement of categories could result in people being ‘pushed’ into transgender positions, and into dangerous and destructive surgery which does not solve their social or personal problems, and which creates new problems for them. This issue implies that surgery, or hormone treatments, should not be the default treatment – but these treatments may have to be normal, until society becomes accepting of ‘odd’ categories.
If, however, people are encouraged to have reasignment surgery to reduce social anxieties about gender categories, then we would expect many people who have had such surgery to protest, to seek re-assignment to their original sex, or to commit suicide at at least similar levels to that which happens to people who identify themselves as transsexual before surgery. This issue needs careful study, rather than suppression. While sex-change surgery may work for some people, it may not be right, or necessary, for others who seem to have similar problems – and again this needs care to distinguish, if we do care.
Category enforcement and Self-identification
Likewise, with social enforcement of gender categories, we can have people who don’t appear to replicate or perform the ideal gender of the sex they have, being told to leave places which should be appropriate for them. For instance, I have heard (no idea how accurately) that some lesbians have been told to get out of women’s toilets or whatever, because they must ‘really’ be men. [see for example 1, 2, 3 ] Simple things like having single unit toilet booths, rather than collective gendered toilets, could solve some of those problems. It might also lessen que problems in women’s toilets.
If we have a severe problem with enforcing categories which are really fluid rather than binary, we may need to be careful about the misery that enforcing these categories can bring about. That is we accept people having ‘gender or sexuality fluidity’ rather than insisting on category resolution through surgery or exclusion. This is clearly not the same as insisting sex assignment surgery should be banned, but insisting that its failures, if they exist, tell us something about people, and when the operation may be appropriate or not, and those failures should not be covered up or not be talked about.
On the other side there are plenty of stories to suggest that self identification, without reference to the social nature of the categories causes problems. In a way, it does not matter if these stories are true or not; they are not implausible and they act as thought experiments which enable us to think about possible problems.
For example, it is supposedly the case that genetic men, men who appear to identify as men, or people who claim to be MtF are supposedly insisting on their ‘rights’ to use women’s toilets, or receive prison sentences as women even if having previously raped or assaulted women. Other people apparently claim to be real lesbians despite aggressive behaviour towards lesbians and even if they still have a functional penis they want pleasuring. These behaviours, imagined or uncommon or not, can easily be seen as men asserting their ‘right’ to violate women only spaces, intimidate women, or continue to rape women.
It also seems possible that some of these claims result from ‘false flag operations’. The person causing the problem is violating women’s space or bodies for pleasure in the violation, or from wanting women to be scared of MtF people, rather than attempting to resolve their own gender fluidity problems. I have read of completely self-identified men entering women’s spaces, trying to make the right-wing point that ‘sex is sex’ and ‘gender is sex’, and that trans people are dire for everyone because they upset strict bounded categories. This works along the lines of “if MtF people can use women’s toilets, why can’t we males?” This is another form of category enforcement.
And how would we distinguish the innocent, or inept, from those exploiting this self-asserted right? If you are gong to exclude MtF from female toilets, how are you going to do it? Genital inspection? DNA testing? X-rays? Or just excluding people who don’t fit the stereotypes of gender? This kind of exclusion, has an easy possibility of leading to real oppression to people born female.
Self identification and Law
The point here is that simple claims of self-identification do not seem enough, and that laws should not be changed to make a simple declaration enough for all situations. Questions of long-term commitment, and acceptance by a community are relevant to the identification issue at least.
For me the question remains as to why these problems cannot be resolved by the law as it is? If people are trespassing and expressing aggression towards others then those being aggressed against should be able to be restrict (or remove) whoever enters no matter what the trespasser claims to identify as. If a previously male rapist claims to identify as a woman, they should not be jailed with women despite their self-made claims; they should possibly be kept in a special protected jail, perhaps along with pedophiles. This does not seem that difficult.
[Likewise I’ve just read of a male prison guard who sexually assaulted at least 30 women in jail, and another who is charged with 95 counts of sexual abuse. There clearly should be no space for that to happen at all. Why was this not seen? why was it allowed? This is is clearly a problem, thirty people is not a negligible number, but it does not appear to have attracted the attention that the possibilities of trans people being rapists has. I don’t know of any real MtF who has been accused of this level of rape. The focus on transgender people seems to be completely bizarre by comparison. Indeed I have had discussions with people who assert that these multiple rapes by male prison guards are not important, when compared to the fact that MtF trans people may enter women’s jails and not rape anyone. This focus seems completely weird, but it indicates that at least some of the anti-trans stuff has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting women. Likewise, if they were interested in protection they would be looking at the number of women who are being murdered by straight males they know.]
Secondly when a person is born male, it seems fairly straightforward to suggest that being accepted as female by people born women is a privilege not a right. Likewise a white person cannot expect to just declare themselves black and be accepted by a black community as black, no matter how strongly they feel they should be, or identify as black.
Having sexual intercourse with someone is also a privilege and not a right. Most people probably learn that most people they desire, do not have to desire them back at quite an early age. Everyone should have the legal right to say ‘no’ whatever the circumstance. No one has a right to claim that because they identify as female, all desired lesbians, or men, must be prepared to have sex with them. People should be able to say no to advances. Anyone can masturbate if they need release, in private. It is likewise not always oppressive for people to have to demonstrate their bone fides and qualifications to join a club. Sometimes that will work smoothly, other times it could lead to potential suffering, but that suffering may be unavoidable at the moment, based on understanding what is possible. Social change takes time, and some people will seek to exploit it or stop it.
The issue again, about gender self identification, comes to the “as long as it does not oppress anyone else, or is used to oppress anyone else” point. Insisting that people should have sex with you is oppression, and should be treated that way. This, again, should not be a difficult problem to resolve. Lesbian clubs almost certainly would have to deal with straight males coming in to cause trouble, and presumably have solutions for it – they probably have to deal with some obnoxious people born female as well and have solutions for that.
It would appear that we can resolve a fair number of these issues, by simple application of normal conventions about unacceptable behaviour, without insisting on the absolute claims of gender and sex categories, and exiling perfectly harmless people, and by not trying to rush people into transitioning (or not transitioning), so as to keep those categories pure.
More talk and more talk
Again it seems difficult to tell how many of these kind of reports of self-declared trans people attacking others, are false flag operations, being used on behalf of the right to split feminism, or the left, as the reports often appear to be politically motivated, and the sources generally do not seem to report the oppressions experienced by trans people or gay people.
However, even if the reports are politically motivated and designed to split the left and deny the existence of people of various genders and sexual orientations, that is no reason to stop discussion about these kinds of issues, or to recognise that at the moment, many women have concerns about the possibility of people-born-male coming in and attacking their private spaces and bodies, or telling them how to run their lives or how to be really ‘feminine’. Or indeed they may not like men policing women only spaces. Silencing only makes those opposing the righteous agenda of two sexes associated with two genders and straight sexuality more vulnerable to divide and conquer.
The way through these problems is more likely to be through discussion, and not through attacking, especially as the “pile on” attacks on questioners, that supposedly originate from transgender people, do imply that dissenting women do have to worry about being threatened by straight males claiming to be women.
Discussion could make it clearer what part of these pile on attacks are false flag operations, and what problems need to be sorted out.
Problems are rarely solved by repression. Splitting will only further the right’s determination to enforce the categories in the way they want. Divide and conquer.
Children
Another area of panic is young children transitioning. As far as I know, this is not common. It is more common than when I was young, but that is not saying much. People had to hide their desires. It also seems to be quite hard to participate in transitioning until the child is relatively old, or has their parents consent. If parents don’t want this and the child does, I guess parents have every right to make their children miserable. They have done so for thousands of years, but again the assertion of children being changed against their parents will, does not seem well documented at all, more a scare-story. But it is easy to stop ‘careless’ medical intervention, without attacking trans people in general.
Final Comments
We may need to recognise that we live in perilous times amongst a resurgent right claiming to fight for family, national values and the protection of children. It seems correct to perceive that these values involve “traditional” sex roles along with enforcement of those roles. Their ideal is that men are the natural leaders with women shutting up and accepting that “feminism” is deviant and unacceptable. Abortion and contraception are to be suppressed, because these give women independence. Children are not to be told of, or observe, any possible sexual, gender or sexuality variants, as this will supposedly keep them straight
Any one who identifies as LGBTQI+, or supports people in this loose classification, potentially upsets this framework, and risks removal or ostracism. It would seem that people who attack trans-people on principle (even if supposedly for the good of trans-people) are likely to feed into a growing movement of attack against all people who are not completely straight in their gender or sexuality. You might of course think, like Putin or various Republicans, that this is good, but others might disagree.
However, the problems brought up by the existence of a few trans people (or people pretending to be trans) are surprisingly normal problems. How do you remove unfair advantage? How do you stop people preventing discussion? How do you stop people assaulting, victimising or harrassing others and so on?
@@@@@@@@
More recent times March 2023
Recently, we have had Neo-Nazi ‘Christian’ groups attacking or trying to intimidate trans people and, gays and lesbians. This is more or less what I was expecting would happen, and the attack on trans-people has turned into an attack on everyone who is not straight, or does not express straight gender identities
Drag Queens are becoming a target of the anti-pedophile movement, who can use this drag queen’s challenge to gender roles to distract from the far greater likelihood that children will be raped by right wing religious types.
In some states in the USA, people are not supposed to support, or otherwise help, kids who identify as trans or gay or lesbian in schools… It must not be talked about, and must be suppressed because the kids must be made to feel sinful.
This was inevitable. It is easy for the right to include, say, lesbians or gay men, amongst the trans people they are attacking, because those lesbians and gay men are obviously ‘deviant’ in their sexuality and gender roles, just like trans-people may be. However, it now appears that discrimination against transpeople can also be supported by gay and lesbian organisations, who don’t seem to realise that this will become a basis for discrimination against them.
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