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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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The talking point about the lack of an enforcement mechanism is silly. The enforcement mechanism is the same as the one keeping regular men out of women's bathrooms: Mostly voluntary, but the women can call security if there's a problem. If you pass well enough that nobody notices or cares, you get away with it.

That seems unworkable in practice.

It's been working in practice for generations.

Well sure. That doesn't say much about whether it would work in practice now.

In particular, "you can do it if you pass" seems almost guaranteed to lead to someone miscalculating at some point.

I meant that more in the sense that anything is legal if you don't get caught. The idea is not that people who think they pass would be encouraged to violate the rule, but that those who actually do pass would in fact get away with it, just as people often get away with violating many other laws and rules.

I'm not even commenting on whether it's a good policy, just pointing out that the idea that we'd need to have a genital-checking guard for enforcement is either stupid or in bad faith (one can never tell with Ocasio-Cortez).

Sarah McBride passes well enough, arguably better than Nancy "manjaw" Mace. Nobody would notice or care if the Republicans weren't grandstanding about the issue. The whole point of the Congressional bathroom rule is to keep a passing transwoman who is not a threat to anyone out of the ladies' room in order to show Republican's disapproval of transgenderism.

In the absence of strong antidiscrimination laws which allow lawfare against people who don't let Jonathan Yaniv into the ladies' room, social enforcement based on presentation works a lot better than bathroom laws based on birth sex or anatomy. In the presence of strong antidiscrimination laws protecting men pretending to be women, neither social enforcement nor bathroom laws work.

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The problem with this logic is that it doesn't generalize. If you allow males into women's spaces so long as they pass well enough, who is going to be the judge of who passes well enough? What rule would you propose that allows Sarah McBride in but keeps Jessica Yaniv out?

You can have a “don't ask, don't tell” policy, which is mostly how things worked before the year 2000, but once the cat is out of the bag, you have to revert to some objective rule about who is or isn't allowed.

The whole point of the Congressional bathroom rule is to keep a passing transwoman who is not a threat to anyone out of the ladies' room in order to show Republican's disapproval of transgenderism.

I don't think that's the entire point. The point is also to keep men out of women's shelters and prisons, men out of women's sports and dressing rooms, and men out of women's spaces in general.

If Republicans cannot even keep men out of women's bathrooms in Washington DC, how can they expect to accomplish any of those other tasks? So even if the McBride issue is itself not important because McBride is likely harmless (with which I tend to agree), the case is important because it is at the fulcrum of a broader issue.

If you allow males into women's spaces so long as they pass well enough, who is going to be the judge of who passes well enough?

The non-trans public.

To the point that this is offensive to trannies, either individually or as a collective, we don't really have to care.

OK. So how many members of the public must complain before she is deemed nonpassing? Is it like a percentage of a quorum? What percentage of what quorum? Is a single complaint sufficient? In that case, how is the rule different from banning transgenders entirely, just with the caveat that you won't face penalties if you don't get caught, which is essentially how all misdemeanors work?

These are the kinds of questions that you have to answer to be fair to transgenders, not the kinds of questions you have to answer to keep the peace on the issue.

The point is also to keep men out of women's shelters and prisons, men out of women's sports and dressing rooms, and men out of women's spaces in general.

Well that's patently not the point of a rule specifically addressing the toilets in Congress. It may be political signalling conducted with those issues in mind, but this rule obviously has no impact on prisons and sports.

Mace has a woman's skeleton, McBride doesn't. Nance would be unlikely to get clocked as trans because of her gracile skeleton and small size. Meanwhile, McBride is one of the reasons being a big boned woman today makes you liable to be clocked as trans and insulted as such in a dispute.

In any case, people like McBride exist to pass strong antidiscrimination laws protecting men who want to pretend to be women.

Making them feel very unwelcome, is it mere grandstanding?

I'm pretty confident that if the average person met McBride they wouldn't think she was a trans woman, partly because there are so few of them that the thought just wouldn't cross most people's mind. They certainly wouldn't bat an eyelid if they saw her in the women's toilet.

is it mere grandstanding?

Yes. There is no way anyone in Congress actually feels threatened by McBride (and if they did that would be a sufficient display of neurosis as to be disqualifying for a legislator).

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