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To the extent there's harm being done, I actually think it's mostly being done to trans people, rather than by them. In my tinfoilier moments I think the whole thing is an active eugenics program to get rid of the autists.
But my point is that I just don't buy the "woman trapped in a man's body thing". I do believe in dysphoria, and I am in favor of accommodating people who suffer from it, but if this is just about helping people with a disorder to alleviate their suffering, it's also fair to set boundaries, like in spas, sports, prisons, locker rooms, etc. If there was no harm in having these things be mixed sex, we wouldn't have segregated them to begin with.
Would you have those boundaries be purely based on biological sex? If so, would you then have a 6’2 hairy muscular trans man like Mitch Harrison go into the women’s locker room?
Conservatives and TERFs often state that allowing trans women into women’s spaces allows any male sexual predator to access them by identifying as a woman, but if you go the other way and say trans people should go where there biological sex says, what’s to prevent a man from going into the women’s bathroom and saying he’s actually a trans man?
I think the middle ground of having people go where they pass as makes the most sense. A passing trans woman with fully developed breasts and SRS shouldn’t change in the men’s locker room - she’d attract very confused stares at the very least. But someone who’s only been on HRT for a few weeks should probably stick to the spaces of their birth sex regardless of what they identify as.
Getting rid of the autists would be a disaster for humanity tho, who would be crazy enough to obsess over computing or electromagnetism or breeding if it weren’t for autistic people? I don’t know what share of modern inventions we can credit to autistic obsession but it’s probably quite high :)
Well, it doesn't quite work the same way, right off the bat for prisons "hey I'm actually a trans man, send me to a female prison" is not going to work. Neither is it going to work sports. They might let someone through initially, but if they see them blow everyone else out of the water, the organizers can ask for proof they're female, or else have the person disqualified after the fact. Even in more informal spaces like locker rooms you at least have a way of resolving the dispute, even if the whole conflict will be awkward for everyone involved.
It might work, but doesn't that grant women in locker rooms the right to say "sorry, you don't pass well enough, try harder next time"? I don't know that this would go down well with the current batch of activists. And anyway, I don't think that will work for prisons and sports.
I'm tempted to say there might not be a good solution here one way or the other.
Yes, I think it will be a disaster. Half of our tech stack runs on trans women and furries.
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