Jarhyn
Wizard
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2010
- Messages
- 15,627
- Gender
- Androgyne; they/them
- Basic Beliefs
- Natural Philosophy, Game Theoretic Ethicist
Brown and black people are noted to be particularly anti-trans. You then note the brown and black people here who support the baker over the trans person. Many gay people are also anti-trans, you've noted the gay people who support the baker. That's why I wondered if you wanted to go down that road.
I'm going to push back on this. I don't believe that any material number of ethnic minorities or homosexuals, or women for that matter, are "anti-trans". Rather, we're "anti-transgender-ideology".
A not insignificant number of women are completely supportive of transgender people being protected from mistreatment, having equal and fair access to housing, employment, and medical care. But those of us who object to the rhetoric do NOT accept that transgender people are in any way the actual sex that they identify as. Transwomen are not women - they're transgender identified men who wish to live as women. The lobbyist and activist approach to transgender 'rights' has been to replace sex as a protected category in law with 'gender identity', where that gender identity is completely internal and self-declared, with no objective measurement and no requirements of any kind. This has the effect of reducing the rights of women and increasing our risk of harm. It results in male-bodied people competing as women in the Olympics, despite the clear advantages of having a male body. It results in male people, who have been raised and conditioned as men, with all of the advantages of being a man in society being acclaimed as the "highest paid female CEO" or the "funniest female comedian" or being placed on short-lists for "female authors" or taking a position as a "female representative" in politics. It results in male bodied people, with no diagnosis and no medical treatment of any kind, being placed in shared cells with female prisoners. It results in males - with intact genitalia - being granted spaces in female-only rape and domestic violence shelters as a right. These are all things that affect females, but don't affect males. Women end up facing a two-pronged attack on this topic: transgender people who want to encroach on female spaces and support system as an entitlement, and men who are sympathetic to their plight and who do not seem to care about the cost being borne by women.
A fair number of homosexual people oppose transgender ideology, because it erases the entire concept of sexual orientation - something that gay men and lesbians fought long and hard to get acknowledged. Transgender ideology replaces sex with 'gender identity', and then redefines homosexuality to be 'attraction to the same gender identity' rather than to the same sex. This then gets used as to harass and condemn gay and lesbian people who don't want to have sex with transgender people. It has hit lesbians especially hard, where they are told that they have 'vagina fetishes' and are 'transphobes' because they don't want to consider transgender identified men as part of their sexual and romantic pool. They are subject to harassment, threats, and coercion if they don't want to engage in penis-in-vagina sex with 'transbians'. There are entire workshops out there for transgender identified men on how to overcome the "cotton ceiling" so they can work their way into the underwear of lesbians. Publications and organizations that advertise themselves as for the "LGBT" community publish articles with tips for lesbians on how to have sexual interactions with the penises of transwomen. It all comes with a very strong "just try it, you'll like it... you only don't like dick because you haven't tried mine" vibe to it. That's a particular sort of sexual coercion that lesbians have faced for a very long time, and just recently when that pressure was beginning to fade... now it's come back and is being pushed by the very organizations that purport to support lesbians and gay men.
When it comes to ethnicity, I can't speak in generalized terms. I know that at least some of it is a result of religion. But I also know a LOT of black and hispanic women who are extremely opposed to transgender ideology for the reasons listed above for women in general. But they tend to be much more vocal about it, because they are the ones who are most directly affected. There is a considerably higher proportion of black women in prison than there are white women in the US... so it is black women who face the risk of having their transgender cellmate rape and impregnate them because the justice system is taking the path of placing gender identity as a feeling above the reality of biological sex. There is a significantly higher rate of rape and domestic violence in black and hispanic communities, and a much higher proportion of women of color make use of domestic violence and rape shelters than do white women.
The thing that all of these people have in common is that we do not hate transgender people at all. We are not "anti-trans". We don't want transgender people harmed or discriminated against. But we're not willing to sacrifice our safety and our rights to provide entitlements to transgender people - entitlements that no other group of people has.
These are all groups of people who have directly faced disadvantage as a result of an innate, immutable characteristic of their lives, one over which they have no control. We can't "identify" out of being female or male. We can't "identify" out of being black or brown or white. We can't "identify" out of being sexually attracted to people of our own sex, or of the opposite sex. And we all understand how vitally important freedom of speech and freedom of belief are to us - because that is the means by which we've been able to make progress in the world. It was the first amendment that allowed the protests, marches, public speeches, rallies, and petitions that got minorities equal civil rights ,that got women the right to vote*, that got acceptance of homosexuality and allowed gay and lesbian couples to get married.
The fantastical apologetics in the above post are worse than I've seen with creationism.
I think the biggest issue is that she doesn't communicate an understanding that trans people can't "identify" themselves out of their own lives either. They can't "identify" their way out of their emotions any more than I can "identify" my way out of my own life.
I didn't properly identify my way into it. I merely named it. "Guy who studies algorithm and precise language to describe tasks to be executed in electromagnetic force by an array of confluences bound within the intricacies of a circular graph of precious metals scribed in space", and long before I named that appropriately, I was searching for a staff.
Similarly, some people identify the voice of the hormone monster and know that is the dissonant note in their life, and when the note is changed, the dissonance is, in fact, greatly reduced.
The fact is, if I walked into a store and asked to buy a birthday cake to celebrate my Nth year on this earth as a Wizard, colored purple because mmmm deep purple looks wizardy, and maybe silver and gold sprinkles amid a smattering of rock candy "diamonds" and other colored sugar crystal sprinkles?? And was told that they will suffer not a witch to live happily on his birthday...
Well, I honestly don't know what I would do. Twenty years ago, you take them to court and they suck it. Nowadays they start a GoFundMe and make a million dollars for being shitty, and it doesn't matter that you can do the same, because I fucking wouldn't. I just want to not be discriminated against when I want a cake.
Then, I live in Minneapolis so I don't really foresee that happening. Back when I was in Missouri, though...
People don't decide their identities... That's not how this works. Rather, we find them and reveal them.