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Seconded. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real medical condition, but also that some people may misidentify as transgender either out of honest confusion about their gender identity, or maliciously in bad faith.
A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction, and sees no difference between a trans person who has suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and who has been taking hormones for years vs. a person who gave no outward indication of suffering from gender dysphoria, only "realised" they were transgender immediately after being convicted of a crime, and who has no taken no steps to make themselves more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex.
Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.
That is true if all one cares about is the culture war. If one cares about formulating sound public policy, esp about such an important issue as crime, not so much.
I do care about formulating sound public policy, which is precisely why I think that a) making self-ID the legal standard is a policy which will backfire horribly for the trans movement and b) I don't support allowing any male convict who identifies as a woman to be housed in a female prison, without any guardrails being imposed at all.
My point is that you can't have it both ways. Trans activists demanded that anyone who declares that they are a woman must be legally treated as a woman. That's the policy they sought. Having succeeded in having that policy implemented (at least in certain jurisdictions), they cannot then turn around and say "No no, Karen White is only pretending to be trans!" The policy they themselves called for draws no legal distinction between a person legitimately suffering from gender dysphoria and someone like Karen White.
Yes, I understand your point. My point is that, if we want to combat crime, we need to understand it, and you are advocating for intentionally using incorrect data. Let's replace transgenderism with autism. Let's suppose there were some benefit to claiming to be autistic in jail, such as better services or some such. So, huge numbers of inmates falsely claim to be autistic. The result is that, superficially, it appears that people with autism are extremely crime-prone. Would you advocate ignoring the fact that those inmates are lying when trying to develop anti-crime policy? I wouldn't think you would.
If "autistic person" was legally defined as "a person who claims to be autistic, no diagnosis required", then the only data we would have would be the data obviously skewed by bad actors.
I acknowledge the existence of people who falsely claim to be transgender (or falsely claim to be experiencing gender dysphoria). The law in the country in which I live explicitly does not acknowledge their existence. The legal concept of "self-ID" makes it literally impossible for a person to lie about being transgender: declaring it makes it so.
Again, everyone knows that Karen White isn't really transgender. Before self-ID became law, anyone who pointed out that the proposed legislation created a perverse incentive and a honeypot for bad actors was smeared as transphobic. Now that the (foreseeable! foreseen!) downsides of self-ID have become too obvious to ignore, trans activists are trying to turn around and say "but those people aren't really trans!"
Sorry, not having it. Anyone who was in favour of self-ID has to take the L and admit that it's their fault that malingering sex offenders are now housed in female prisons. If you support a policy which defines transgender people as "anyone who claims to be transgender", you don't get to pick and choose who will make such a claim.
You actually aren't disagreeing with me. Of course it is their fault that fake transwomen are in female prisons. But when trying to figure who commits crimes, we can acknowledge that while simultaneously noting that the crimes those people committed were not committed by transwomen, just as we can acknowledge, per my hypothetical, that autistic people do not commit a huge pct of crime, even if a huge pct of prisoners successfully claim to be autistic and thereby game the system. We can blame the autistic rights folks for the latter, even while doing the former when formulating criminal justice policy.
Sound public policy requires that the movement that pushed such grotesquely unsound policy be vanquished, lest it continue to impose unsound policy on us. As such, the single most important thing that can be done in response to this is what @Folamh3 is doing.
You're trying to convince him to put out a fire while the kid with matches and a can of gasoline is still right there going nyuck nyuck nyuck. I get it, the fire is a problem, but putting it out doesn't help until Mr. Pyromaniac is down for the count.
Sound public policy about prison housing might require trans activism to be vanquished, but sound public policy about crime does not, unless possibly transwomen are actually the source of a lot of crime, which we will never know if we follow Folamh3's path. He is literally prioritizing "owning" his outgroup over understanding the sources of criminal activity. He isn't putting out fires; he is making it harder for firemen to do their jobs.
Not trans activism, leftist activism, and all its tentacles. It must be stopped on every front together.
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