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Notes -
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/canadian-tribunal-transgender-nonbinary-restaurant-worker-pronouns-b1931972.html
https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/resources/professional-regulation/law-society-of-bc-tribunal-decides-in-closed-prehearing-to-hold-full-hearing-away-from-public-eye/366594
Off the top of my head -- Peterson himself of course is also facing legal reprisals.
Can anyone explain to me what the heck is going on in Canada? Seemingly there's someone who wants to turn themselves into an actual hermaphrodite, and instead of going "here's the contact details of a good psychiatrist", they are solemnly debating whether public healthcare should pay for such an operation.
Also, there's a clinic in Texas which will do this operation if it gets paid for? Texas??? When did Mad Science become something in the real world?
@guesswho is doing a valiant job of trying to present the steelman version of all this, especially as we're all lining up to rebut them, but then with my own lying eyes I read a genuine news story of this sort, and blow me down, I find it very hard to believe that there's anything sane at all in the trans activism movement that is going after Rowling.
Surgeons and cosmetic surgeons aren't really regulated in the same way as drugs or other forms of medicine - if a surgeon and patient are willing to try something, they're allowed to do it.
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Literally a mix? Why'd they need doctors when any old kitchen appliance or garden power tool would do?
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Texas has loose regulations just in general and Austin is extremely progressive.
Still, though, I thought "Sure, I'll turn you into Fragoletta" was the province of "The Island of Dr. Moreau", or at least Classical sculpture, and not something that has an entire clinic set up for it.
Swinburne seems to have been enchanted by the topic, as he wrote another poem, Hermaphroditus. I wonder if this verse is a warning about not to have too many expectations about the outcome of such surgery?
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This is what we call 'an anecdote'.
Lots of crazy people out there, anyone can appeal a decision and ask for a hearing, let me know if anything actually happens. This individual was already ruled against twice, I'll be surprised if the third time's the charm here.
The Telegraph writing an article about this doesn't suddenly make it the central issue of the whole trans rights debate.
Agree that trans women are women and deserve all the rights and respect of any other woman, and I'll happily agree that we should shelve the question of hermtaur surgeries for the next 50 years or so.
But if you're not ready to grant the first thing, which is what everyone actually cares about, then don't pretend the conversation has 'moved on' to stuff like this. The conversation is still very much about the first thing.
Unanimously approved.
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Why should anyone agree to something you don't even believe yourself?
To be fair, he could well have changed his mind in the intervening two years.
Two things:
Agreed on both counts.
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Coming back to this, and trying to make my point clearer: years back, over on Ozy Brennan's blog at the time, we were having the first debates as the first rumblings around 'bathroom laws' were being made. To be fair to Ozy, they were as neutral as they could manage, permitting the criminal bad-thinkers like me and other anti-trans enthusiasm types to engage in argument.
But I was assured over and over, and indeed rather condescended to, that "No no no, things like this will never happen, that's just tinfoil hat conspiracy fever dreams of really right-wing fears".
And then things like the case of Demi Minor happened (and believe me, I'm as sick of bringing this up as you are of hearing it). Why do I bring it up, then? Because cases like that are not an aberration or an anomaly, they're the logical outcome of the "no objections entertained, any hesitance is gatekeeping and transphobia" activism.
How did Minor get into a women's prison in the first place? Lawsuits.
Minor claims to be a Real Woman, so by that logic, and your demand to me, I must agree that Minor is a trans woman and that "trans women are women and deserve all the rights and respect of any other woman".
Which means that you want me to accept and not alone accept, but agree that this woman, via her feminine penis, impregnated two other inmates of the women's prison with her feminine sperm and is now the baby-momma (can't say daddy, that would be misgendering!) of their children. Because "Trans women are women like other women". Do you see why I don't go along with your call to agree that?
Back then, as I said, we were told things like this would never happen. And then they happened. All in accordance with the principles being imposed on society by lawsuits and legislation and activism for trans rights.
A year or two ago, if anyone had said that there would be someone suing to force health insurers to pay for their hermaphrodite surgery, they would have been told "No no no, that's tinfoil hat fever dreams of the extreme right".
But now the 'hermtaur surgeries' as you phrased it (thanks for the term!) are out there and being brought to court with the same language around "forced conversion therapy". And even worse, while this may be a case that will end up being dismissed, there is a clinic up and running and happy to perform whatever slicing and dicing you want so long as you can pay for it. So plainly there must be other such cases of people wanting such surgeries.
At this point, if anyone says "Oh come on, nobody is going to try to graft a second head onto a human body, that's just tinfoil hat crazy talk", I'm expecting that within six months we'll get a news report out of China or somewhere about how this very thing was done.
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The first thing, or at least the earliest thing that comes to mind right now, was the gays. Slippery was the slope, and here we are with men pretending to be women and political activists wanting to force people to validate these delusions.
It's not much of an extrapolation to see where the wind is blowing from, and where to.
I reject the idea of a history of civil rights where you draw the 'first' line at the last thing you feel conflicted about, and then draws a slope starting there.
if you want to go that far back into the history of civil rights to try to draw a slopeand calim it slippery, then the 'first' thing is repealing miscegenation laws, or slavery abolition, or like challenging the right of prima nocta or w/ethefuck.
I don't want to make this about semantics, so let's not. If you really want me to bite the biggest bullet available, then fine, what Americans count as "civil rights" is egalitarianism taken to excess and any society is better off throwing it all out than accepting it all without question. It's quite possibly better to make too many distinctions between people than to make too few. The optimum is likely neither 0 nor 100.
But we needn't go that far into the abstract. Concepts like slavery, race and marriage are tangibly real, universal and highly relevant to almost everyone in ways that transgenderism is not, and no amount of false equivalence will make the latter any more substantial than it clearly isn't.
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That's something I'm uncertain of, because first we all learned the pop culture version of it, then later on it was said to be untrue, and right now I'm in ignorance of what the opinion is. Let me go look it up.
Okay, looks to be regarded as a myth. You're really batting a thousand on inaccurate references in this debate, friend. You want to go three-for-three on the Inquisition, 'cos I've got a rebuttal video on that as well 😀
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The justification for "trans women are women" is the same as the justification for hermaphrodite surgery.
It's really, really not. 'Hermaphrodite' is not a social category, outside of furry porn.
If "social category" is a classification of people that makes a significant difference to how they are treated and grouped by social instiutions or practices, then "hermaphrodite" is a social category that predates trans women/trans men (in the predominant modern senses) as social categories. In many cultures, by THOUSANDS of years. The Ancient Greeks were making myths about hermaphrodites long before the sex/gender distinction was even invented. The Laws of Manu distinguish three genders: male, female, and hermaphrodite. Ancient Rabbinic law distinguishes hermaphrodites as a separate category. Ask anyone in the ancient world to tell you what a hermaphrodite is and they would be able to tell you; ask them about our modern categories of transness and your chances of initial comprehension of the relevant categories would be more dubious.
The main difference is that hermaphrodite is also a longstanding biological category that presumably predates humanity, but obviously something can be both a social category and a biological category.
Or are you using "social category" to mean something else in a way that excludes hermaphrodites?
Also, you probably don't think that being a social category identified on the basis of appearance or genitalia is a sufficient condition for self-identification rules, because you probably don't think that race should be determined by self-identification rules. So this is a potential red herring: even if it could be proved that hermaphrodites are a social category, that wouldn't be enough to change your mind.
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Careful there! Furries are an oppressed gender and orientation minority, give 'em a few years and you'll be writing pro-furry rights posts on here. You could ask Tracing Woodgrains for some advice on that. I don't know what the 'politically correct' term for furry is, I'm sure there must be one. Seems that therians are different, so what the posh version of furry is, someone enlighten me.
Alright, that’s enough.
The usual rules about strawmen apply. As does the one about speaking plainly, though I’m sure anyone reading the thread can detect your sarcasm from orbit.
Seriously, no joke, tell me that in a few years furries won't be part of the entire queer umbrella grouping. Trace is half-way sane and respectable, there have to be more out there like him, and since they're even holding cons, then it'll become first an identity and then politicised.
And then the likes of the left "identity" defenders will be here telling me to accept furries, just like I'm being asked to agree that "trans women are women".
I'm using sarcasm instead of volcanic wrath, to be a bit cooler about it. Though I'm not really aggravated by furries, oddly enough; I was online-acquainted with one some years back due to mutual fantasy genre literature interests and got a great glimpse into their personal life and how they ended up like that. I am way more aggravated about guesswho wanting me to go "yes, I'm a woman and this person with a dick who fathered two kids is also a woman, just like me".
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But non-binary is (by your side's standards).
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Absolutely I'm not ready. What do we mean by a woman? A biological woman, because they're dosed up on hormones and maybe had surgery, too? No. The same as a cis woman, totally the same? No. Legally a woman? Well, if the law permits it, sure. Now you can call yourself Yolanda Désirée Ladyfingers and have "F" on your driving licence and be referred to as "she/her".
But the movement towards "drop the trans, just say woman"? No, I'm not giving in on that. All the rights of any other woman? And what rights are those? To retain male characteristics and still be able to go into women-only spaces? To declare that a lesbian who doesn't want sex with your feminine penis is not a real lesbian?
EDIT: And in fact, it's the very demands around "the first thing" that enable the crazy people. Or where do you think the rhetoric about "This is conversion therapy which is illegal in Canada" came from?
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