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I take it, then, that you think biological men competing in female sporting events is fair.
I think you're missing the whole reason that women's sports exists. (No, I'm not talking about Title IX.)
It's because for most sports, if you just had an open competition, at the highest levels, no women will win, ever. There are some exceptions, but in general, women's sports exists because they will do worse otherwise, at least, against other athletes.
This is not surprising; the need of the woman's body to be able to provide for pregnancy and childbirth places is something of a tradeoff against physical ability, whereas men's bodies hardly need to do that at all.
Okay, so maybe, sure, it's fair to have them compete, but the whole point of the existence of the category is equity rather than fairness, in one of the rare cases where most people agree that that's a good thing. Having trans activists in it gets rid of the equity (as then we're back to the point where ordinary women are no longer represented among the elite) and still limits the fairness, because it excludes men.
Okay, then. A quick syllogism.
This is anti-LGBT (provided by @guesswho)
This is good (most agree that this is true)
Some anti-LGBT things are good. (logically follows, by existential generalization)
This is valid.
Maybe you don't agree with premise 2, but it's very common, and I've briefly argued for it above. You at least are arguing that most normies should believe they think that some anti-LGBT things are good.
Only if moral truth rests upon democratic majority, in which case, I have several questions. Chiefly, do different things become good depending on where you are and local sentiments, or do we need to take the majority of the global population? Or do we need to go even further and take the opinion of all people that ever lived? Does ultimate truth require us to know the opinions of all future people as well?
The only place that I see you would be getting democracy from is in the last part, so I assume you're addressing that.
I was assuming my second point; he is of course free to reject that.
I was not trying to argue for truth by democratic majority. (That would also have some other, weirder implications: it would make ethics non-local, though I suppose that might already be true. Would angels/demons or far-off aliens get votes, should either exist? You can't exactly poll them. You would also have the fact that many in history would affirm beliefs that are currently rather unpopular, (yes, yes, precisely the point is that popularity isn't what matters), like that (post-birth) infanticide is fine.)
But I was figuring that guesswho might not like the statement "most people (even in the west) agree that some anti-LGBT policies are justified," and so I was trying to show that that followed.
Why might he not like it? Because I think the original purpose of describing it as anti-LGBT was to try to indicate that we're just some weirdos who have beef with LGBT people, or something, and this policy is an outworking of that, but when it's a fairly broadly conceded view, it becomes far harder to present one's opponents as crazy when even some of one's allies might agree with them.
And I figured he'd prefer to say that people are against a sports policy (in a way that doesn't say that most, even some of the left, are sometimes anti-LGBT) than affirm that they are sometimes anti-LGBT more flatly. That is, arguing that anti-LGBT things are democratically preferred. Since both sides like to think themselves as part of the majority in a democracy, and to have the mandate of the masses (should such a thing exist), I figured he wouldn't like that too much.
Yeah, I get that that isn't exactly a rational argument, and I'm not even sure to what extent it succeeded in what it was trying to do, but the aim (though not quite so explicitly formulated in my mind at the time of typing it) was to adjust what dialogically made sense.
That, of course, is not an argument that means that guesswho must be wrong.
Funnily enough, I described this argument and (what I imagine to be) the motivations behind it in my last effortpost before this one. Like you, I acknowledged that the fact that an opinion is popular doesn't imply that it's right. But it's still annoying to have your opinions mischaracterised as crazy fringe extremist views when they enjoy a high level of popular support.
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