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A lot of people have already given the Red Tribe arguments, but I think there's a more complex underlying one that's easy to miss.
This morning, literally, I had a discussion about whether overheard joking or misunderstood naming or pronouns applied against a trans person (in this case, trans male, but I've had the awkward 'you know she used to be a he' version before from a guy who apparently thought I was very clueless) could be unlawful harassment. It's not wrong, either as a matter of law or a matter of policy.
And yet, it's hard to understate how much of a change this is from even local Blue Tribe norms less than ten years ago! I'd had similar conversations in deep Blue Tribe LGBT-friendly spaces at that time, but the equivalents were over things like when and how it becomes appropriate to handle pronouns without risking involuntarily outing someone. There was interest in passing something like GENDA, but it was far from an obvious and certain thing. Even in LGB-specific spaces, trans men are pretty new to a lot of people's radars.
That's not to say that makes the novel standards wrong. But they are, to a very large part of society, both novel and potentially ruinous to violate, while also completely unknown to one side and wildly obvious to the other. I don't think people understand the extent this make the 'defensive vs' offensive' framework even less useful than it might otherwise be.
Women secretly passing as men is a common literary trope partially because there are multiple instances of it happening historically. How many of those would identify as trans men by today's definitions is impossible to know (probably some, certainly not all?). But all of them would have expected to be treated as their identified, not birth, gender.
That said, putting trans people on people's radars is exactly what the left is accusing the right of here. Until the right started making noise (and laws) about which bathrooms people were using, it wasn't something people were paying attention to, so trans people were often able to fly under the radar.
This seems like reversing cause and effect to me. Isn't it quite likely a more accurate explanation that people simply noticed some odd presences in their bathrooms, that those who objected to them were the only people who had any reason to "mak[e] noise" about it, and that those people by implicit virtue of objecting to them automatically became right-sorted on the issue (even if they're perhaps otherwise fairly centrist (or even left-wing, those exist) or politically apathetic)?
Your version implies that, for example, the classic image of the "MtF" aspiring transsexual who looks, in terms of the general strength and direction of their biological secondary sex characteristics, somewhat like "Macho Man" Randy Savage in a dress (and though this obviously isn't all of them, they absolutely do exist and in many cases the volume of their behavior matches that of their appearance) was just hanging out in women's bathrooms with nobody the wiser or concerned until some dedicated, already dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers (like I'm imagining a MAGA cap-wearing "bathroom patrol" clothed in all red, not that I imagine that you meant to imply something quite so strawmannish) started "making noise" about it. Even a heavily toned down version of that doesn't seem realistic to me.
Do I think that your Average Joe who wasn't personally affected by the issue was paying attention to it? No, as they rarely do to any issue other than to maybe drop a quick virtue signal about the designated cause of the week. But it wouldn't have been something that "noise" was fit to be made about unless actual real people were affected by it. I guess what I'm trying to say that is that right-wingers by no means invented the inherent weirdness and discomfort for many people of certain gender/sex presentations and characteristics showing up in contexts where they traditionally had never and that "noise" almost certainly would have been made about it in any case. (I certainly remember much "noise" being made about it before any laws regarding the subject were even proposed much less passed.)
People were going to notice if they had seen so much as more women with prominent Adam's apples in their bathrooms (and even left-wingers probably would have "ma[de] noise" about this if they hadn't been given the appropriate ideological mandates), much less the more extreme retention of masculine secondary sex characteristics by many feminine-identifying aspiring transsexuals. You can stop many people from declaring their findings out loud, but, at least for now, you can't stop most of them from simply noticing (in the unofficially illegal sense) themselves.
There's a gradient here between more and less gender-non-conforming (to be clear, I mean identified gender, not sex-assigned-at-birth; I am intentionally not using "trans" here because gender-non-conforming cis people are also affected). I expect that more gender-non-conforming people have always had trouble in gender-segregated spaces while only moderately/lesser gender-non-conforming people may have been more likely to go unnoticed. The recent culture war over the issue means some people are a lot more aware of looking for gender-non-conforming people and therefore noticing ones that are only slightly gender-non-conforming that would have gone unremarked on before.
The question is who made the first attempt to move the Chesterton's fence of what level of gender-non-conformance is acceptable in gender segregated spaces. I had pointed to the North Carolina bathroom bill, but there was apparently a year or so of lead-up involving the left winning court cases and making rules at various legal levels that that was in response to. Of course, with court cases, it can be difficult to determine the aggressor (e.g. was it an intentionally set up test case), but it looks like the left started it, not the right.
That's just like if a few high-profile heists make shopkeepers more alert and thus more likely to detect petty shoplifting though. Nobody's fundamental values have been changed.
That is, similarly to how there's never been a "Chesterton's fence" among shopkeepers declaring any amount of shoplifting acceptable (as opposed to simply too financially trivial and difficult to detect to be worth worrying about), I don't think there was ever any "Chesterton's fence" declaring any level of "gender-non-conformance" in regards to not belonging to the biological sex conventionally associated with a particular space acceptable. (Meaning I don't think there was ever any point at which people who objected to the more extreme cases of highly visible biological males in spaces generally reserved for biological females accepted the less visible ones, just that, like petty shoplifters, they weren't worth trying to detect because the overall general risk of having any biological male in such a space was seen as lower.)
So unless you deny people's rights to those values/boundaries, a positive service has been performed in increasing their vigilance in enforcing those values/boundaries.
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There's a darkly humorous irony there. Transmen hitting the point where they're completely ignored and no one acknowledges their existence is a big sign that they've made it and are passing. Welcome to manhood, brother, no one gives a fuck, have a beer and deal with it.
Ah, sorry, that is the case to some limited extent in a few subcultures now -- furry treatment of the topic isn't great, but it's closer to the 'have a beer and deal with it' than anything else -- the post I'm linking to is more about a period where it was not really understood as a possibility, even for people who did not pass and were recognized. There were some places that were aware enough: eg, Norah Vincent's Self Made Man is further complicated by her own politics, but recognized the possibility of a "man trapped in the wrong body", as did some NPR interviews with her. But a lot of places could and did just treat as butch female, and not in a 'just one of the guys' tomboys extent even then.
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There's a "funny" corollary to that with detransitioners, where everybody's focused on the harm done to FtMtFs, while MtFtM's tend to get the "have a beer and deal with it" treatment.
This is somewhat justified with FtMs being the majority of trans people, but given their invisibility while trans, your theory is probably more likely to be correct.
FtMs are the majority? Maybe recently but historically the ratio is 10:1 in favour of MtFs
Yes. They now outnumber MtF 3:1. The recent flip in age and gender ratios, combined with the exponential increase in referrals, is one of the big arguments for the social contagion theory.
Wow that’s a crazy reversal. Probably the largest and quickest in the history of psychiatry
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Obligatory Norah Vincent reference.
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