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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   32006 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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I think I’d be marginally okay with a process that had significant time and effort to “transition”. I don’t think it reasonable to have an intact male declare on Tuesday that he feels like a woman and then get unrestricted free rein to enter any women’s spaces he likes — especially those where women would undress. But my fear is that the process once adopted will be made less strict over time — no need for surgery, then no need for hormones, then no need for medical diagnosis — until you end up with the thing the requirements were to prevent.

We can simply have a different bathroom for trans people (maybe a single stall). In India, it is required by law for all public places to have a different bathroom for the third gender.

This seems the sanest alternative. Sometimes technological solutions can fix social problems. (Just like the washing machine). Most trans-people who do not pass when naked will prefer single cabins, and a few shy or traumatized cis-genders might also prefer single cabins.

We have disabled loos already, which they can use in many places. More to the point, I suspect that a significant percentage of trans people are motivated precisely by the desire to be openly accepted as a member of the opposite sex, and will oppose this kind of segregation.

I think this percentage likely looks more than the actual percentage due to vocal activists. Probably, many transgender people will like being openly accepted as the opposite sex but they would still be ok with a compromise that has other areas for them.

I believe that you are almost definitely correct on this. Such a compromise most likely would be acceptable to the vast majority of people, including trans people. However, this would fail to mollify the vocal activists, and so it wouldn't solve the actual problem we have, of the vocal activists annoying the rest of us. In the long run, we can reduce the throughput of the pipeline that leads to people becoming vocal activists so that their population is small enough not to cause problems, but in the short run, we'll likely have to keep running into this problem.

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