Eleocharis
18d ago
I find the simultaneous "wow, this brave show sends a really necessary message to the evil Trump administration!" and "message? what message? You're imaging things" on the left fascinating, but it gets pretty tiring at this point
Why do people on this forum impute that I automatically hold other left-leaning positions when I express some unrelated left-leaning opinion? I have not said the first of those statements.
Eleocharis
19d ago
I feel like reading any "message" into this is kind of missing the point. It's a marketing venture by a corporation hoping to get more business in Latin America. Maybe the fact that this half-time show exists is emblematic of something, but it's not like the small number of people who ultimately made the decision that this was the show they were going with were thinking about anything besides market growth.
Eleocharis
20d ago
I'll be honest I think we've neared the end of what we're going to get out of each other usefully in this discussion. These mostly seem to me like super weak excuses, for things that are mostly the direct result of an environment within immigration enforcement that is deliberately prioritizing deportations over basic human decency. I'm sure you don't see it that way but I have a hard time understanding why.
All I see is a subset of the right, including several very highly placed people in the administration, who have completely lost their minds about an issue that is not particularly different than the myriad of political issues that are constantly being discussed, and don't really care who they hurt in the process of solving it.
Eleocharis
20d ago
The legal system is not being disregarded by Trump, every court order has been obeyed.
Clearly we are living in different information environments.
Last week, Minnesota’s chief federal judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, threatened to hold the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in contempt, accusing ICE of violating 96 court orders in January alone — more, the judge noted, “than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/06/minnesota-immigration-crackdown-court-strain-contempt/
I'm not going to spend the time finding links for all of these but some other examples of ridiculous behaviour:
- Paying El Salvador to keep people in a torture prison
- Lying to the court that Costa Rica was unwilling to accept Abrego Garcia in order to try to punitively send him to Africa
- Detaining a student for writing a milquetoast op ed
- Detaining people in such density that there is not enough room for them to lie down, and in e.g. bathrooms
- Not allowing members of congress to inspect ICE facilities
- Leaving the cars of people they arrest unlocked and running in the middle of the street
- Spraying pepper spray at protestors from the car window while driving by
- Calling people their agents had just shot terrorists and assassins based on zero evidence
- Releasing people from custody outside in Minnesota without winter clothing
- ...
I would prefer that the government didn't do things like this. I don't think these things were happening in previous administrations...but if they were there's no time like the present to develop a conscience.
Eleocharis
21d ago
I never suggested giving up civil rights.
I disagree, and seemingly so do the Dems proposing these changes.
Politically, when immigration laws are selectively not enforced, specific political parties can basically import their electorate. Instead of a Democracy, where the people choose their leaders, we are in an Anti-Democracy, where the leaders chose the populace. The United States has a few unique political considerations:
Ok so the median voter is 3% further left, big whoop. Immigrants are not automatons who just vote for whoever wants more immigration. Hispanics only voted a little more for Harris than Trump, and I'm quite sure that would flip if the Republican Party would stop courting the votes of actual racists. The CBP agents who killed Pretti were Hispanic!
Biden's immigration policies were very unpopular and there is quite a broad base of support for restricting immigration. There is plenty of political capital to change things. That's probably why Trump won. There isn't some pro-immigration conspiracy. My preferred policies are unpopular. New illegal immigration has basically stopped. The anti-immigration side is winning. Nothing here warrants the performative cruelty, the wanton disregard for human rights, the dishonesty, the disregard for the legal system that we are seeing from the administration.
Ok, illegal immigrants in the trucking system are causing problems. I don't believe that the solution to that is stopping random Hispanic people going about their day on the streets of Minneapolis.
Eleocharis
21d ago
What percentage of support would you need to see before you would agree my point that
Overwhelming support. You can relax other priorities in desperate situations. But I think the fact that ~50% of the population supports a party that does not support much more restrictions on illegal immigration is strong evidence that this is not a desperate situation where we need to start giving up civil rights.
I just want the administration to chill out. Pass some laws to change the asylum system. Make it harder for employers to use illegal labor. Ramp up ICE staffing in sustainable ways. Whatever. None of those are big issues even if I wouldn't actual agree with those policies. But stop pretending we are in some crisis where where the world is going to end if you can't deport millions of people immediately. If it was actually such a crisis people would not be taking to the streets to defend their own neighbors who are supposedly having such a negative effect on them.
Eleocharis
21d ago
I could quibble with your numbers but that's besides the point, it doesn't fundamentally change anything if the real ratio is 1 in 4 or whatever.
As I said in another reply, there are certainly situations where you might want to change laws and norms to deal with problems that are too bad and too intractable to address otherwise. Everything is mutable if you have enough societal consensus.
But the difference between illegal immigration and many other crimes is that some substantial fraction of the population is not in favor of deportation regardless of how the person is found. You could probably find various different numbers, but first one I found from before ICE was in the news is this: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/americans-views-of-deportations/, which implies that some 40% of Americans think that illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes shouldn't be deported.
So to answer this:
If a police officer has located someone who has a more-than-half likelihood of having committed a specific crime, wouldn't you want that officer to at least question that person?
If that crime is illegal immigration, with no other crimes alleged, no I don't want them questioned. The police don't have any right to know who I am while walking down the street, and the immigration hawks don't get to just run roughshod over established practice because they decided that their specific cause is soooo important.
Eleocharis
22d ago
When investigating a crime, it is perfectly reasonable to investigate people who have some connection to the crime, and mostly it isn't a huge problem if there is profiling in choosing which of those people to investigate.
It's also perfectly reasonable in most cases for the police to use statistical evidence in looking for and deterring crimes, if doing so in ways that do not impose any real cost on a person (say driving patrols, something that is more valuable in higher-crime neighborhoods).
It is not reasonable to randomly stop people because they are statistically more likely to have committed a hypothetical crime. You can't stop young black men just to see if they might have stolen goods in their pockets and you don't get to stop hispanic people just to see if they might not be legal immigrants.
I wouldn't say I'm a total hard-liner on this, it's more reasonable to investigate people with a more tenuous connection to a crime when problems are more impactful and more intractable. The Troubles is a good example, El Salvador's gang problem is probably another. It is inappropriate to use similar tactics on something that a large percentage of the populace doesn't even think is a big problem, and certainly so in a community where a majority of the people who are supposedly being impacted by the problem would prefer you weren't enforcing it at all!
Eleocharis
22d ago
It's not unreasonable. But there are laws, and at least previously a societal consensus, that you should not have to deal with random police harassment because of your basic demographic characteristics. One of various things that the right has seemingly decided are less important than deportations.
Eleocharis
23d ago
So there's a tendency on the left when discussing this topic to refuse to ever say anything that could possibly construed as denying someone's conception of their gender. This is where the stupid circular non-definitions come from. But reversed stupidity is not intelligence, this does not mean there isn't a reasonable point of view in there. I don't think this is "sane washing", I'm not trying to justify or defend this person's conduct or beliefs, I'm trying to determine what policy is reasonable.
Gender is an attempt to decouple the social roles that tend to be associated with particular sexes from the biological reality of those sexes. I would say gender is essentially "everything that tends to be associated with a particular sex but can be decoupled from the biological reality of that sex". Gender identity is "the set of those things that one wishes to have", and a female gender identity means you largely want to have the things that are associated with the female sex. I'm sure many would take issue with these definitions, but I think these definitions accurately describe how people use these words.
So,
- An individual's parent of the male sex.
- An individual's primary caregiver of the male sex.
#2 is a central example of something that is gender, not sex. Yes, historically it is people with male sexual characteristics who would be referred to as fathers even in adoptions. But the biological sex is completely irrelevant in this case, if someone could successfully pass as the opposite sex, they absolutely would be treated that way.
Gender" or "gender roles" or how the man "identifies" simply wouldn't enter into the discussion at all
Yes, because they do not decouple sex from gender. I still don't understand why you think that this gestalt of "sex" and "gender" actually only corresponds to what I would refer to as "sex" and not "gender". This seems tautologically false?
a trans person will invariably show up to assert that, no, I really am "female" and it's dehumanising to describe me as "male".
There is not actually this clean linguistic separation between sex and gender in actual usage, regardless of whether we might wish that was true. "Male" and "female" get used to refer to both gender and sex all the time. But this person likely would use "Assigned male at birth" to mean the exact same thing you mean by "Male". You probably think this is obnoxious, because I do too. But you are talking about the same thing.
Eleocharis
24d ago
I think calling a trans woman a mother is basically the same as calling an adoptive woman a mother. I don't think anyone here is saying that adoptive mothers can't call themselves mothers because they didn't e.g. give birth. I don't really see how this situation is any different.
You are phrasing things in a maximally sinister way. But yes, you are being asked to use words in a specific way. You are free not to do so but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me and certainly doesn't feel like an evil plot.
I can't speak for anyone else but I have no issues with the idea that fatherhood excludes trans women in most contexts.
Eleocharis
24d ago
No I am not claiming that. You are claiming that usage of a word in historical contexts where no distinction was made between sex and gender somehow provides information on whether the word best applies to sex or gender.
Eleocharis
24d ago
I find this response confusing.
For most people in most of human history, the word "father" refers to individuals of a particular sex, not individuals of a particular gender identity.
If you believe this, you do not understand what people mean by gender identity. Gender and sex are two components of what was previously seen as a single concept. It's not a brand new layer built on top of sex, it's taking certain components and calling them "sex", and other components and calling them "gender". As you say:
"the question "does the word 'father' refer to the male parent, or the parent with a masculine gender identity?" would simply be incoherent."
It would be incoherent because they do not make that distinction.
Only a tiny minority of currently living humans currently believe this is a distinction worth litigating
Certainly. But you are litigating this distinction:
I understand the word "father" to mean "the male parent" and not "a parent with a masculine gender identity".
Or @HereAndGone2 above:
the transwoman (gender) is the father (sex) of the child, not its mother.
To state it plainly, here are two different statements:
- Gender and sex are not concepts that should be separated out.
- The word "father" clearly refers to sex, not gender.
#1 is a coherent view that I disagree with, but it seems you hold. #2 is something you are claiming that seems pretty obviously false to me. It's at best ambiguous, and in actual practice it gets used in line with gender in situations where sex and gender do not agree.
#2 is an incoherent statement unless you reject #1, even if only for the sake of argument. Do you believe that, within the frame where we believe that sex and gender are separate concepts worth distinguishing, it makes sense to refer to this woman as a mother? If not, why?
Eleocharis
24d ago
how the word is used in common parlance
Not sure what you mean by this? This certainly isn't how trans people and the people around them, i.e. the people who actually need to make this decision on a regular basis, use the word. Most fathers are cis men, and usage in that context provides no information on this question.
centuries of legal precedent
Precedent from times when there was no distinction made between sex and gender is totally meaningless for answering this question.
There are certainly contexts when "father" refers to sex characteristics (e.g. use of the verb father) and certainly contexts when it refers to gender roles (e.g. adoptive parents). You are free to believe that those things cannot and should not be separated. But it's silly to pretend that one of those contexts doesn't exist. Some people think the gender context is more important and can be separated out. That is a coherent view even if you disagree with it.
Eleocharis
24d ago
Sure, but this post is clearly using it in the derogatory sense. In which case, fine, you do you, but I didn't think the goal of this forum was to signal how much you dislike trans people.
Eleocharis
24d ago
Haha I think that is certainly unpopular but fair enough!
Eleocharis
24d ago
This all seems contingent on the idea that "father" must refer to sex, not gender. I don't really see where you are getting that from. Certainly in the nascent world of out trans people, that isn't how it is used.
If you're just arguing against self-ID in general, fine. I've rehashed that enough in the past and am not really interested. But the OP of this thread, and your post, both seem to imply that there is something additionally bad about this situation. And I don't really understand what that is. It seems silly to me to think that the rule would ever be that she is both a "woman" and a "father". Of course if the state is willing to recognize her as a woman it should also recognize her as a mother. That isn't a "lie", everyone involved understands perfectly well that she didn't give birth to the kid and nobody is attempting to claim otherwise.
Eleocharis
24d ago
On what basis have you determined that "father" must refer to sex and not gender?
Eleocharis
24d ago
Do you feel that referring to a person as "it" is a good way to have productive conversations?
Eleocharis
24d ago
You are right to call this out. My most charitable explanation is that she just misspoke when she said "same-sex" (other than that, she didn't say anything contradictory) - though it does seem that as of late, TRAs has started conflating the 2 concepts (more egregiously are the terms MtF and FtM, which refer to sex!)
People don't have platonic definitions in their head that they use to make their speech perfectly logical. The generic term is "same-sex marriage" so that's the term they use. People use "male" and "female" to refer to both sex and gender, hence MtF and FtM.
Eleocharis
25d ago
Ireland allows self-ID. Do you think it would be reasonable for a trans woman who adopted a child to be referred to as the child's father, by the state that recognizes them as a woman? Of course not, "mother" is the most reasonable word in this context.
There's no lying here, you just don't agree with self-ID.
Eleocharis
25d ago
I don't think that's what's happening here. The kid is entitled to citizenship whether it is their mother or father who is a citizen, but for some reason (poorly written law? bureaucratic nonsense? malice?) this isn't being applied in this case.
Eleocharis
25d ago
I don't really see how you're reading this as objectionable over and above the usual self-ID.
The facts seem to be that:
- This child is entitled to citizenship as one of their biological parents is a citizen.
- The parent who is a citizen is recognized as a woman by both Irish and UK law.
- That parent neither gave birth to nor contributed the egg to this child.
I don't really see how you can accept #2 while also believing that she should have to self-report as the father of the child?
I think my main objection here is the twisted logic on show: "You can't call me a 'father', I'm a woman! women are not fathers!" Yeah, but people with functioning male reproductive systems that are capable of getting cis women pregnant can be women. Uh-huh.
Are you intending these two statements to read as contradictory? They seem to be saying exactly the same thing to me?
Eleocharis
28d ago
This seems like an absurd over-reaction to a single case of protestors disrupting a church service, for which they are facing charges?
After some more thought I think my initial statement was too strong, surely the political views of employees do seep into these kinds of outputs to some extent.
I still think that this show was pretty clearly aimed at hispanic people, especially those in Latin America. As an anglo America any message in it is kind of besides the point as you are not the target audience.
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