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Notes -
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/canadian-tribunal-transgender-nonbinary-restaurant-worker-pronouns-b1931972.html
https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/resources/professional-regulation/law-society-of-bc-tribunal-decides-in-closed-prehearing-to-hold-full-hearing-away-from-public-eye/366594
Off the top of my head -- Peterson himself of course is also facing legal reprisals.
Can anyone explain to me what the heck is going on in Canada? Seemingly there's someone who wants to turn themselves into an actual hermaphrodite, and instead of going "here's the contact details of a good psychiatrist", they are solemnly debating whether public healthcare should pay for such an operation.
Also, there's a clinic in Texas which will do this operation if it gets paid for? Texas??? When did Mad Science become something in the real world?
@guesswho is doing a valiant job of trying to present the steelman version of all this, especially as we're all lining up to rebut them, but then with my own lying eyes I read a genuine news story of this sort, and blow me down, I find it very hard to believe that there's anything sane at all in the trans activism movement that is going after Rowling.
This is what we call 'an anecdote'.
Lots of crazy people out there, anyone can appeal a decision and ask for a hearing, let me know if anything actually happens. This individual was already ruled against twice, I'll be surprised if the third time's the charm here.
The Telegraph writing an article about this doesn't suddenly make it the central issue of the whole trans rights debate.
Agree that trans women are women and deserve all the rights and respect of any other woman, and I'll happily agree that we should shelve the question of hermtaur surgeries for the next 50 years or so.
But if you're not ready to grant the first thing, which is what everyone actually cares about, then don't pretend the conversation has 'moved on' to stuff like this. The conversation is still very much about the first thing.
Coming back to this, and trying to make my point clearer: years back, over on Ozy Brennan's blog at the time, we were having the first debates as the first rumblings around 'bathroom laws' were being made. To be fair to Ozy, they were as neutral as they could manage, permitting the criminal bad-thinkers like me and other anti-trans enthusiasm types to engage in argument.
But I was assured over and over, and indeed rather condescended to, that "No no no, things like this will never happen, that's just tinfoil hat conspiracy fever dreams of really right-wing fears".
And then things like the case of Demi Minor happened (and believe me, I'm as sick of bringing this up as you are of hearing it). Why do I bring it up, then? Because cases like that are not an aberration or an anomaly, they're the logical outcome of the "no objections entertained, any hesitance is gatekeeping and transphobia" activism.
How did Minor get into a women's prison in the first place? Lawsuits.
Minor claims to be a Real Woman, so by that logic, and your demand to me, I must agree that Minor is a trans woman and that "trans women are women and deserve all the rights and respect of any other woman".
Which means that you want me to accept and not alone accept, but agree that this woman, via her feminine penis, impregnated two other inmates of the women's prison with her feminine sperm and is now the baby-momma (can't say daddy, that would be misgendering!) of their children. Because "Trans women are women like other women". Do you see why I don't go along with your call to agree that?
Back then, as I said, we were told things like this would never happen. And then they happened. All in accordance with the principles being imposed on society by lawsuits and legislation and activism for trans rights.
A year or two ago, if anyone had said that there would be someone suing to force health insurers to pay for their hermaphrodite surgery, they would have been told "No no no, that's tinfoil hat fever dreams of the extreme right".
But now the 'hermtaur surgeries' as you phrased it (thanks for the term!) are out there and being brought to court with the same language around "forced conversion therapy". And even worse, while this may be a case that will end up being dismissed, there is a clinic up and running and happy to perform whatever slicing and dicing you want so long as you can pay for it. So plainly there must be other such cases of people wanting such surgeries.
At this point, if anyone says "Oh come on, nobody is going to try to graft a second head onto a human body, that's just tinfoil hat crazy talk", I'm expecting that within six months we'll get a news report out of China or somewhere about how this very thing was done.
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