Just treat people with respect irrespective of your own knee jerk reaction views.
This is actually what I try to do. Not saying I'm perfect, but I try to be respectful.
It's not like I don't use people's preferred pronouns or treat them as their preferred gender, after all. It's just that it seemed to me in the past, when we had a much smaller trans population, people understood this was a legal fiction and social nicety. No one was claiming that they were LITERALLY the same thing as people born as the biological sex they preferred, as Ferguson has seemed to imply a few times (and I apologize if I am mischaracterizing his views, but it seems to me he believes sex can LITERALLY be changed or is somehow not rooted in biological reality, which is simply untrue). It's just THAT particular "2+2=5" stuff which really gets under my skin. Feels like people are telling me to not believe my own lying eyes. And THAT, no matter what "side" it is coming from or what the intentions behind it are, is the kind of thing that is going to get a "kneejerk" reaction of defiance out of me 100% of the time. I will play nice, I will go along with people's preferred pronouns and treat them as they wish to be treated, no problem. What I will not do is redefine reality or pretend that my senses are wrong or that there is such a thing as a "girldick" or whatever. A line simply has to be drawn somewhere.
But yes, the theoretical level is very different from the real world, where most anyone with a thread of decency and social awareness will treat people as they want to be treated regardless of personal views on the nature of sex and gender identity. I strongly disagree with and do not associate myself with TERFs and such who do not do this.
Now where this does get a little more complicated is matters like sports, where acknowledging biological realities becomes a necessity, and where it seems particularly mad to me to pretend otherwise. Doesn't mean you have to stop treating people with respect, it's just that we have to drop the pretense and legal fiction a little bit and gently remind people that they have unfair advantages for obvious biological reasons. Or at least, that's how it SHOULD be. Unfortunately some people have strong negative reactions to this and seem to feel entitled to run roughshod over women's sports and refuse to acknowledge any advantages. This again seems like madness to me, "2+2=5" stuff. It just seems like common sense to me that you shouldn't stop acknowledging how you were born even if you go to great lengths to alter your identity and presentation later on. And indeed many trans people do just that. I have much respect for those people. The Lia Thomases of the world, on the other hand...
People have judged you on this. Hell brotha, even I judged you a little on this. I really don't feel like doing that this morning. So I'll just make a direct logical appeal to you.
You are thinking of this as a "2+2=5" bit when in reality it's more like a "not absolute 100%" issue. We all know that biology isn't a clock that runs perfectly. Some folks are born blind. Some folks are born deaf. Some folks are born with a idfk what to call it "brain issues"? And some folks are born and live their entire lives like human personification of Greek Gods in marble. The human body, much like everything else in existence, is not guaranteed to be what you expect it to be. There are even some folks who are born with both male and female parts. . . . . . . . . how do they identify which gender they belong to? And given that there are
hermaphrodites, why in the world is something like transsexualism considered
inconceivable?
Poll
