I'm Skunk and I speak for the transgenders™.
Anyway, I will respond to most of the points made in this thread. Some of these points have already been brought up by others in the thread, and while repeating them will be somewhat redundant, I'll try to make this as comprehensive as possible.
TERFs say nasty things about trans people and outright deny that it is a real phenomenon, with trans women just being men who want to "steal the benefits of feminism" or whatever. Not what she was doing at all.
Rowling doesn't espouse the typical TERF ramblings directly, but she is at the very least allying herself with them. She describes Magdalen Burns as an "immensely brave young feminist" and a "great believer in the importance of biological sex" when in reality Burns described trans women as being akin to blackface and a fetish.
Now, you can say that this doesn't necessarily mean she's a TERF, but what other conclusions are there to draw when she is hyper-focusing on ways in which the trans agenda is allegedly destroying women's spaces and propping up horror stories of people detransitioning (
which is reported in less than 1% of people who transition in UK, and that's ignoring the fact that transitioning in the UK is an incredibly cumbersome process that requires gender therapy session and is extremely hard to obtain for most people) and instead of on the much more common issues of
transgender people being victimized and abused in their daily lives?
And as for not saying nasty things about trans people, within the essay, she explicitly compares trans activists calling people TERFs to incels and Donald Trump's infamous "grab 'em by the pussy" rant. Does that not qualify?
Her point is that, in a culture where a "woman" can be anyone who calls themselves a woman, there is basically no point in having gender-segregated bathrooms or locker rooms because anyone can walk in and there is no way of knowing whether they belong there or not. This is pretty straightforward and not at all controversial.
If that is her explicit point, then she does a terrible point of making it. She spends most of the essay talking about how trans activists are sending her death threats (which I'm sure some are, and those people are deplorable and should be condemned, but it doesn't make her any more right), how young people are being pressured into identifying as transgender (
which they aren't, the recent upward tick in trans children is a sign of society progressing to where trans people feel safer to come out), and talks about her personal experiences with womanhood and what that means for her (which some of the stuff is genuinely disheartening and I am sorry she had to go through the domestic abuse she faced, although this obviously has nothing to do with the topic at hand). Do any of these really have anything to do with her alleged point?
Yes. And some people are born with one eye, or with three arms. But if you ask someone how many arms or how many eyes a person has, they will say "two." The same is true for genders. Acknowledging statistical anomalies does not mean that we must incorporate them into our everyday lexicon.
Yes, most people do have two eyes and two arms. And yes, most people consider themselves to be either male or female and as such children are taught there are men and women. Things are often simplified to make things easier for children to understand, but just because people were told that were three stages of matter in early elementary school, doesn't mean that plasma is SJW nonsense.
And if you want to believe that sex is absolute and binary for simplicity's sake, then fine. Most trans people are perfectly comfortable acknowledging their biological sex and don't wish to abolish it, they just also believe that gender isn't intertwined with it. It's mostly intersex activists who find the sex binary unhelpful for the various reasons Figueira pointed out.
Regardless, sex being binary or not doesn't interfere with your "everyday lexicon". It isn't hard to be trans inclusive with your language, as the author of the article that started the whole debacle did by saying "people who menstruate", thereby including trans men and AFAB non-binary people who menstruate in addition to cis women.
Sure she may be a transphobe or something in other aspects; but saying "women who menstruate" is extremely dumb unless you are talking in a very specific medical sense (which I do not think was the case here).
Again, the phrase wasn't women who menstruate. It was people who menstruate. I agree that the phrase "women who menstruate" would be dumb and not at all necessary, considering menstruation isn't an issue for trans women and as such I don't need to feel included whenever people are talking about it.
However the initial backlash to her seemed to be about saying things or liking tweets that just said "lesbians shouldn't be pressured into attraction to penises" which strikes me as pretty much common sense and find it mind boggling this is even something controversial today.
Honestly, I'm in agreement with this. Nobody should be forced to have a genitalia preference one way or another. However I'll qualify this statement by saying that often times the justification of not being attracted to trans people is because the person does not believe they are the gender the trans person says they are- a justification people use regardless of pre-op or post-op status. If you don't want to have sex with a trans woman because she isn't your type or because you're not really comfortable with penis, that's fine. But if you don't want to date a trans woman because you don't believe she's a "real" woman, then that's transphobic.
However, the "vast majority of people" may not take advantage of this, but apparently nothing is stopping them. Nothing is stopping me-- a 6'3" man-- from "identifying" as a woman and joining the WNBA. Nothing is stopping a man from entering a woman's bathroom-- his behavior might get him kicked out, but apparently the fact that he is in there is not enough to remove him from the premises by your standards. I think there is a way to compromise here that preserves the rights of transgenders while simultaneously rejecting the (obviously wrong) radical idea that anyone can "identify" as whatever they please.
Well, the fact that you're an Atlas poster and not a professional basketball player is stopping you, for one. Maybe you should try identifying as a decent person instead. Aside from the ad hominem attacks™, do you honestly think an organization like the WNBA, which people have to work rigorously for years to be a part of, have athletes that are always in the public eye, have access to extensive background checks for their athletes, etc. would go "drats, foiled again by those SJWs, I suppose we have to admit this 6'3" man in because he says he's a woman"?
I think the key thing here that a lot of the trans movement seems to have forgotten is that there is a difference between biological sex and gender identity. Sometimes your gender identity is the relevant thing. Other times your biological sex is what's relevant, like in elite sports leagues or what bathroom you use, particularly if it's one where people shower or change clothes. You've got people now earnestly calling biological sex a "social construct". Pretty sure no one "decided" that some people would have penises and others would have vaginas unless you believe in god.
Why should biological sex be important when it comes to sports leagues or bathrooms? If you want to ensure fairness- then you aren't going to do that by banning transgender female athletes from competing against women. For starters, this isn't even that much of an issue, considering you hear a lot more about the issue transgender women competing in sports than you hear about transgender women actually winning sports competitions. You'd think if this was such a pressing issue, that would happen more often. And even if you discount that, if you reduce men's and women's sports to being solely based on your sex, you're just going to have
transgender men who take testosterone be forced to compete with cis women- essentially creating the same problem to begin with.
And as for bathrooms, I agree with John Dule that we should promote more all gender bathrooms. That aside, the need to ensure that only people of the appropriate biological sex go into the men's or women's room is also pointless and just serves to incite more transphobia. As many, many people have already pointed out, potential sexual predators aren't going to be dissuaded by a sign on the restroom. Aside from that,
transgender people are much more likely to be attacked in public bathrooms than cis people. Most of all, as much as people like to think they can easily spot someone who's transgender, you aren't going to be to tell who is or isn't based on who enters. If you still think we need to enforce strict laws that ensure people go to the bathroom based on their sex to accommodate the cis women who feel uncomfortable that a transgender woman may be peeing next to them feel safe, are those same cis women going to feel comfortable sharing a bathroom with
transgender men like this guy?
Well, then this is an excellent chance for you to educate us poor toothless hick bigots on what "gender identity" means! Good of you to take this opportunity instead of falling back into smug mischaracterizations and personal attacks.
In the very simplest of terms, gender identity refers to one's perception of their gender. This most often correlates to a person's birth sex, but doesn't always. This is different from gender expression, which refers to how the ways a person presents adheres to their gender identity or not, and gender roles, which refers to the expected social norms that dictates how men and women in a society typically present and behave. All of this information and sources can be found on Wikipedia's page for gender identity, which you can read in your own time if you're actually interested in the subject.
Do you have a "right" to be a woman that was denied to you by your chromosomes? Of course not. It sounds like your problem here is not with me-- it's with God, physics, nature, or whatever other universal motive forces you happen to believe in.
Ignoring the first two points which are laughably hollow and immature, I'll concede the in your view I don't have a "right" to be a woman. I do however have a right to use which bathroom I please, right to choose to undergo hormone replacement therapy to help alleviate gender dysphoria, and right to call myself a woman, live as a woman, and enter women's spaces should I choose- regardless if some transphobes take issue with that.
Now, from this point on, somebody else can take it from here, because I think I've said more than enough on this subject.
