Continental Europe enters the gender wars (user search)
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  Continental Europe enters the gender wars (search mode)
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Author Topic: Continental Europe enters the gender wars  (Read 1039 times)
ingemann
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« on: June 13, 2021, 05:33:13 AM »

Quote
In Germany one of the bills, put forward by the Green Party, proposed that children be allowed to have gender-reassignment surgery from the age of 14, even if parents oppose it. It would also have introduced a fine of €2,500 ($3,045) for referring to a trans person based on their natal sex.

Admittedly, this is pretty excessive. Almost no one, myself included, thinks that reassignment surgery ought to be performed on minors, and I don't see the purpose of the fine besides fueling Jordan Peterson-style arguments about trans people being agents of censorship or whatever. I'd support the Spanish proposal, though.

Quote
The proposals are “an authoritarian move dressed up as a liberal one”, says Melli Beinhorn of LGB Alliance Deutschland, a gay-rights group.

No one who identifies with "LGB" should be taken seriously, and it angers me that they're given credibility here. Excluding trans people from any queer rights activism is rooted in seeing them as inferior or fraudulent, in a way that you wouldn't expect from other queer people but is all too common.

I still don't understand OP's derangement around trans issues. Does it not get tedious? Even as a trans person myself with an obligation to be tuned in to this sort of thing I can only take so much Discourse™ at one time before my brains start oozing out of my ears.

I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taken serious just because they exclude trans people, whether they should be taken serious or not should depend on how many people they represent nothing else.
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ingemann
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Posts: 4,226


« Reply #1 on: June 13, 2021, 05:59:00 AM »

Quote
In Germany one of the bills, put forward by the Green Party, proposed that children be allowed to have gender-reassignment surgery from the age of 14, even if parents oppose it. It would also have introduced a fine of €2,500 ($3,045) for referring to a trans person based on their natal sex.

Admittedly, this is pretty excessive. Almost no one, myself included, thinks that reassignment surgery ought to be performed on minors, and I don't see the purpose of the fine besides fueling Jordan Peterson-style arguments about trans people being agents of censorship or whatever. I'd support the Spanish proposal, though.

Quote
The proposals are “an authoritarian move dressed up as a liberal one”, says Melli Beinhorn of LGB Alliance Deutschland, a gay-rights group.

No one who identifies with "LGB" should be taken seriously, and it angers me that they're given credibility here. Excluding trans people from any queer rights activism is rooted in seeing them as inferior or fraudulent, in a way that you wouldn't expect from other queer people but is all too common.

I still don't understand OP's derangement around trans issues. Does it not get tedious? Even as a trans person myself with an obligation to be tuned in to this sort of thing I can only take so much Discourse™ at one time before my brains start oozing out of my ears.

I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taken serious just because they exclude trans people, whether they should be taken serious or not should depend on how many people they represent nothing else.

I'm not inclined to take you seriously on LGBT issues after you said:

TERF is simply a slur against women.

I really don’t care, I tell what I see, and I think anyone using the term TERF about other people is a bigot.
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ingemann
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« Reply #2 on: June 13, 2021, 06:05:46 PM »

Switzerland moved towards a self declaration system last December without basically anyone batting an eyelid (and legally recognizes non binary identities as of last month)

Broadly speaking, the trend in western continental Europe has been a rather quiet move towards better and easier recognition of trans identities, with only relatively limited pushback. In stark contrast to the USA. I mean the fact in itself that there has been barely  coverage of this even within Germany and Spain is probably the best example of how much more relaxed people are about the topic in continental Europe

Or, more specifically, the equivalent emotional debate in Europe tends to centre around gendered language, which is an issue that anglophones on this here blog tend to have a hard time understanding

Tbf I think it's more the other way round, no one cares because no one talks about it and no one encounters any of that stuff in real life.

It's hard to get worked up about something if you never encounter it or even really hear about it.

I'm talking about France ofc. Maybe it's more mediatized in other European countries.

I think if culture wars are so extreme in the US, it's because each side has to make a big song and dance about all of their positions rather than try to push for their views in a more discrete manner.

I think we shouldn’t ignore the aspect; that a lot of politicians doesn’t really care and if the politicians treat something as a silly non-issue, it becomes hard (even if the media would like to push it) to create interest for the issue. In a lot of European countries you don’t really have the same kind of environment on the universities to push these issues, as universities tend to be public owned and live up to some kind of standard of relevance, which American universities doesn’t need because they’re a private product.
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ingemann
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« Reply #3 on: June 13, 2021, 06:08:00 PM »

TERF of course was first used as a term by radical feminists, to describe others of their ilk who they nonetheless disagreed with on trans issues. Clearly it has now become an all-purpose label for any who are not fully behind the trans rights agenda, but that is not how it originally emerged.

It started that way, but the Voldemort word also just started as the Latin word for black and any reasonable person would see that word as a slur today.

Words becomes slurs, if they’re used as slurs.
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