[Genuine Realist]

GR, good to hear from you, and I thought of you several times in this thread, as I remembered you had made the “open” versus “Restricted” events many years earlier.  I thought your post was good, but I noticed that in your desire to make this a women’s issue, you ignore transgender men.  In fact, much of this thread ignores the fact that a substantial proportion of transgender people identify as male (the literature I’ve seen states that transgender women outnumber transgender men 2 to 1, in addition to those who identify as some other category, so we are leaving out a substantial minority of the transgender population).  I’m not going to presume what other men here believe, but the focus on transgender women makes me think that the concern about a transgender male coming into a bathroom as a poster on this board is using a urinal is not high on the list of concerns.  So the focus on transgender women is doubly puzzling.  Since there are women on this board, maybe we should hear what they have to say.  But the one quote from a female athlete that was brought out on this thread (Stanford’s Brooke Forde) was basically “let them compete”.  Unfortunately, it is only one data point.

BC

Hi BC, thanks for the kind words. One of my pleasures with the old CEB was the opportunity to express myself with a stridency I would never used in flesh-and-blood life. This site has been deliberately organized to minimize that sort of thing, and so I mostly lurk so as not to become inadvertently controversial. 

To the point:

(a) The problem with Jacko's language is that it is so decorous that it becomes impossible to express the point that Martina Navratilova and my daughter-in-law would like to make. It may be offensive to biological males transgendered to women that they are NOT female for all purposes, that they retain a significant athletic advantage. But there is certainly evidence of that point - the position is hardly irrational (in fact, a bit too rational for many) - and you have to have some vocabulary left to make the argument.

(b) To me, the issues are completely practical. I have no interest in any philosophical or theological aspects of this particular subject. Thus, biological females transgendering to male cause no practical issue whatsoever with athletics. They are welcome to try out for all the male teams they want. There is no issue about any athletic advantage. We are definitely in foolish consistency territory here in suggesting common issues and a unisexual rule.

© The same applies to bathroom use. I don't know whether anyone recalls the initial disputes about the issue, but they weren't about etiquette. They were about security. The authoress J.K. Rowling became controversial on the issue in large part because she has been sexually assaulted in a restroom as a young woman, this when they were gender specific, and was gravely concerned about  a much larger safety issue if women's rooms were open to men. Likewise, I don't recall any of the opposition dwelling on social niceties. They asked the obvious question of how you prevent predatory males from masking themselves as transgender (no one's going to require a doctor's certificate to use a restroom) for their own purposes - to which there is no good answer.

The obvious, easy answer is to require restroom use by assigned gender, because, as others have remarked, it isn't that big a deal. You can set up a third class of gender neutral restrooms if you like, but as a practical matter they're going to become second men's rooms, because no woman in her right mind would use them. (BTW, I have educated the women in my life never, EVER to get into an elevator alone with a strange man. Incidents are rare, but they do happen, and you can take the next car easily enough. The principle's the same with gender neutral restrooms.)

The reason for the controversy is the strident, insistent assertion of transgender women that they are women for all purposes, so that consigning them to the men's room is insulting, no matter how inconsequential or trivial. Here's where I am back in CEB mode. At the minimum, transgendered individuals are extremely unhappy individuals, so much so that they will undertake surgical mutilation (sic), sterilization, and acceptance of an ongoing hormone regimen to which their phenotype may be completely resistant, just to escape a bodily prison. I'm not going to quarrel, deprecate, argue, or anything else, with their right to identify themselves anyway they like. I'm also aware of the colossal variation in hormonal types in both genders. 

But at the end of the day, in practical spheres in which the identification collides with the rights of others - athletics, safety concerns in restrooms - no, I don't think they are women for all purposes. The need for that gender reidentification has to yield to that practicality. Ultimately, I don't think you can change gender as fully, completely, and absolutely as many would like to.

[Genuine Realist]

GR, good to hear from you, and I thought of you several times in this thread, as I remembered you had made the “open” versus “Restricted” events many years earlier.  I thought your post was good, but I noticed that in your desire to make this a women’s issue, you ignore transgender men.  In fact, much of this thread ignores the fact that a substantial proportion of transgender people identify as male (the literature I’ve seen states that transgender women outnumber transgender men 2 to 1, in addition to those who identify as some other category, so we are leaving out a substantial minority of the transgender population).  I’m not going to presume what other men here believe, but the focus on transgender women makes me think that the concern about a transgender male coming into a bathroom as a poster on this board is using a urinal is not high on the list of concerns.  So the focus on transgender women is doubly puzzling.  Since there are women on this board, maybe we should hear what they have to say.  But the one quote from a female athlete that was brought out on this thread (Stanford’s Brooke Forde) was basically “let them compete”.  Unfortunately, it is only one data point.

BC

Hi BC, thanks for the kind words. One of my pleasures with the old CEB was the opportunity to express myself with a stridency I would never used in flesh-and-blood life. This site has been deliberately organized to minimize that sort of thing, and so I mostly lurk so as not to become inadvertently controversial. 

To the point:

(a) The problem with Jacko's language is that it is so decorous that it becomes impossible to express the point that Martina Navratilova and my daughter-in-law would like to make. It may be offensive to biological males transgendered to women that they are NOT female for all purposes, that they retain a significant athletic advantage. But there is certainly evidence of that point - the position is hardly irrational (in fact, a bit too rational for many) - and you have to have some vocabulary left to make the argument.

(b) To me, the issues are completely practical. I have no interest in any philosophical or theological aspects of this particular subject. Thus, biological females transgendering to male cause no practical issue whatsoever with athletics. They are welcome to try out for all the male teams they want. There is no issue about any athletic advantage. We are definitely in foolish consistency territory here in suggesting common issues and a unisexual rule.

© The same applies to bathroom use. I don't know whether anyone recalls the initial disputes about the issue, but they weren't about etiquette. They were about security. The authoress J.K. Rowling became controversial on the issue in large part because she has been sexually assaulted in a restroom as a young woman, this when they were gender specific, and was gravely concerned about  a much larger safety issue if women's rooms were open to men. Likewise, I don't recall any of the opposition dwelling on social niceties. They asked the obvious question of how you prevent predatory males from masking themselves as transgender (no one's going to require a doctor's certificate to use a restroom) for their own purposes - to which there is no good answer.

The obvious, easy answer is to require restroom use by assigned gender, because, as others have remarked, it isn't that big a deal. You can set up a third class of gender neutral restrooms if you like, but as a practical matter they're going to become second men's rooms, because no woman in her right mind would use them. (BTW, I have educated the women in my life never, EVER to get into an elevator alone with a strange man. Incidents are rare, but they do happen, and you can take the next car easily enough. The principle's the same with gender neutral restrooms.)

The reason for the controversy is the strident, insistent assertion of transgender women that they are women for all purposes, so that consigning them to the men's room is insulting, no matter how inconsequential or trivial. Here's where I am back in CEB mode. At the minimum, transgendered individuals are extremely unhappy individuals, so much so that they will undertake surgical mutilation (sic), sterilization, and acceptance of an ongoing hormone regimen to which their phenotype may be completely resistant, just to escape a bodily prison. I'm not going to quarrel, deprecate, argue, or anything else, with their right to identify themselves anyway they like. I'm also aware of the colossal variation in hormonal types in both genders. 

But at the end of the day, in practical spheres in which the identification collides with the rights of others - athletics, safety concerns in restrooms - no, I don't think they are women for all purposes. The need for that gender reidentification has to yield to that practicality. Ultimately, I don't think you can change gender as fully, completely, and absolutely as many would like to.