Agreed, but also I think a lot of it is gonna depend on how the transition goes. Like it would help a lot if someone like Elliot Page did a movie playing a totally ordinary cis male part and average people see it, say “that guy is pretty good, never heard of him before” and then get their minds blown like “wait he used to be the girl in Juno/Inception/whatever?” when someone explains who he is.
If a celeb has a less than seamless transition (see Caitlyn Jenner or anybody older going MtF as an example), then it just perpetuates that shitty attitude that obviously all trans people are weirdos who will never fit in. Unfortunately so much bigotry just comes from visceral feelings about this stuff (like sure there are/were all sorts of religious and other pretexts to be against gay people, but in the end the reason for it with these idiots boils down to “it squicks me out”).
It seems quaint now but california had proposition 8 on gay marriage on the ballot as recently as 2008 (and it passed!)
attitudes have changed drastically since then. I live in a very conservative area so it was probably more noticeable but the rhetoric surrounding that was shocking by today’s standards. Even culturally, around that period, there was a glut of comedy surrounding characters where the punchline was literally “ha ha that character is gay” that you’d never see today.
One thing I feel like is part of the momentum of acceptance in more conservative areas is when people saw gay folks living “normal traditional lives”. Like you would hear people in conservative areas talk about the first gay wedding they went to or the gay lawyers down the street that they watch football with or whatever. And it’s readily obvious to anyone walking by on the street they were gay as it was two middle aged dudes living together.
But for trans folks this is also going on but it may not be readily apparent to the neighborhood the person is trans so it doesn’t as quickly normalize the situation in more conservative areas.
It kinda just happened really suddenly. We went from laws outlawing civil unions to gay marriage nationwide in less than 20 years. It was weird how fast society shifted on that one. Most other civil rights movements took a lot longer.
And as Trolly posted in the poor media outlet thread, Singal deleted his Twitter today, but I refuse to think the universe is kind enough to let us actually be rid of him
The thing that pisses me off most about the so called trans debate is that it is all so clearly a smoke screen. What actual trans people I know want isn’t wildly unreasonable and isn’t controversial when explained in a sane way. They want to be called what they want to be called so call them that to be polite, if you get it wrong make a good faith effort to get it right the next time, don’t fucking hurt/kill them. They want basic politeness, safety, and bodily autonomy. This is somehow conflated as being them somehow imposing themselves on other people.
Meanwhile we have ~60% of the population whose lives are at least meaningfully worse economically than the generation before them, a lowering life expectancy, and we haven’t even gotten into the roaring dumpster fire that is the entire brown people situation.
Somehow these assholes have incinerated something entirely uncontroversial to smokescreen dozens of major problems that are currently festering in the background any one of which honestly matters vastly more than any trans issue because it affects 10x+ more people (many of whom also happen to be trans, that’s another thing the trans people I know want… fucking health insurance, a living wage, and an affordable apartment).
The whole thing is infuriating and when people try to talk about trans issues the whole conversation tilts me because I know we’re participating in the smoke screen even if we mean well.
First and foremost, I’m pissed off at people not getting to live their lives as who they know themselves to be. Live how you want to live. Love who you love. Dress as you want to dress. Be called how you want to be called.
But secondarily, it pisses me off that, even if these fuckwads want to deny that “transgender” is a thing, they’re denying the existence of objectively, scientifically, inarguably intersex people. We know that there are people born with ambiguous genitalia. We know that there are people out there who are XY but have female body plans. We know there are people who are XXY. We know that people with male body plans can have female-ish hormones and people with female body plans can have male-ish hormones. I’d love get a straight answer from some evangelical politician asshole about if God didn’t make these people who they are, then who did? You wanna tell me that someone who came out of their mother’s womb intersex is some spawn of Satan? Huh, please, let’s hear your thoughts on abortion.
Yeah all of that pisses me off too, but the fact that the other side doesn’t actually care and we’re actually bothering to debate it with them in bad faith is suuuuuper tilting.
I really wish our politicians would just start pivoting to the issues they’re trying to smoke screen instead of actually engaging. The entire conversation is terrain picked by the other side because it’s advantageous to them so naturally not only do we argue with them about it but we also let them frame the entire conversation. It’s bullshit and I’m tired of it.
Just once I’d like to see someone respond to a bad faith argument about trans people with “You don’t give a shit about trans people Kyle, I’d be surprised if you’d ever met a trans person before you started bullying them for political gain. You want to talk about trans people so that you don’t have to talk about infant mortality in your state since…” or literally any other topic that we win on handily.
Literally everyone at the Olympics is a genetic freak who put in a ton of work, not just one or the other. But, gotta lock down the genetic freaks who make conservatives uncomfortable, natch. Mise well ban 7 footers from basketball, because that kind of genetic variation is unnatural.
This is actually one area where I’m genuinely kinda conflicted about what the right solution is. I mean intersex people do exist, and if being a female-presenting athlete with a specific condition that affects hormone balance turns out to be the cheat code to make it 100x easier to succeed in women’s sports, then on its face that seems like a big issue? And I don’t feel like it’s much of a stretch to consider trans women at certain stages of their transition to be in that same ‘family’ as intersex folks, as far as hormone profile and its effect on strength etc.
I just have no idea what the right way is to go about fixing the issue. I obviously don’t want every aspiring female teenage athlete to have to go through an involved medical exam to rule out that they’re XXY or something (the conservative strawman of course would be rooting out these ‘groomed’ girls that have been forced into secret MTF transition by their parents in order to reap the huge financial rewards of a career in women’s sports, which we know isn’t a thing but still).
I’m not a doctor but the right way to do this can’t be to ostracize the athletes trying to compete or to set rules based on conservative theories instead of actual science.
Michael Phelps is less affected by lactic acid (which causes that burning in your muscles when you’re exercising) than most people, and he’s got freaky long arms. Secretariat might have been off to the glue factory instead had he not had a freaky large heart. In general, the interaction between genetics and athletic performance is incredibly complex, but one place where a simple interaction has been found is baseball. Baseball players, as a rule, have fantastic vision, and, while that can be trained to a degree, there’s a strong genetic component.
I have a nephew who’s a pretty darn good hockey goalie. He plays on traveling teams that win things. His chances of playing in the NHL are basically zero, because his parents are short, and he’s not going to be over 6’. That’s pretty much no matter how hard he works (maybe he could juice up with some HGH).
As much as it’s fun to pretend that sport performance is a function of the hard work to build muscle and respiratory capacity, and precise training to get good at the skills necessary for the sport, it’s not, it never has been, and it never will be, and it won’t be at any level of competition. Most kids involved in sports have probably seen at least one kid who was born just over the cutoff date and who hit puberty a little earlier than everyone else and who was born to big, athletic parents and thus who’s just bigger and stronger than everyone else and wipes the floor with the competition. Maybe that evens up later when the other kids catch up. Maybe it doesn’t, but those sorts of advantages are allowed in sports. So, once we grant that certain kinds of innate advantages are OK, it gets harder and harder to say that a person who’s just living life as they were born should be excluded because their particular genetic advantage isn’t OK while some other person’s genetic advantage is.
Trans athletes are a little trickier, because trans men or boys would be taking testosterone, something specifically forbidden for cis men and boys, and trans women or girls who’ve been through male puberty are likely to have some advantages (bone density and ligament and tendon strength, specifically) that persist even after years on female hormones. The former is addressable by settling on an accepted testosterone level that is in the normal male range but probably under the highest levels that unjuiced cis male athletes might have, and then let things fall as they may. The latter is especially tricky due to the difference in ages between when puberty happens and when we give kids full agency over their lives, not to mention when kids settle on whether they’re trans or instead gay with a somewhat effeminate presentation or something else queer. But still, letting a trans woman compete with male-ish ligaments but female-ish musculature doesn’t seem that bad. She may be less prone to injury but still not able to throw a 100 mph fastball (men tear ligaments doing things like playing football or throwing fastballs for years on end. Women tear ligaments doing things like playing volleyball.)
the solution is to let every sport use as much performance enhancing drugs as they want. there, no more “issue.” I say issue in quotes because much of the hand wringing about women’s sports is done by people who wouldn’t be caught dead watching women’s sports.