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Only in the "cries out in pain as he strikes you" sense, holy cow.
It's really interesting that you simultaneously suggest that "the left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade," (nevermind that was imposed by SCOTUS and not anything like the result of a legislative process where all citizens had their say) because when it comes down to it the right wants the "status quo" of people with penises and Y chromosomes to have separate bathrooms, prisons, sports teams, and certain other facilities from people with uteruses and lacking Y chromosomes.
And definitely prefers the status quo where it doesn't matter what the person claims to identify as, the term 'man' and 'woman' has an easily verifiable component that isn't subject to the individual's personal preference. And that, on it's face, is entirely compatible with trans people being 'left alone.'
If trans people 'just want to be left alone' that message REALLY hasn't gotten through to the actual left.
Why else are, among other things, the existence of a biological male competing against biological females and unsurprisingly dominating the sport supposed to be celebrated as an achievement, even if this ruins the competition for biological females?
In what sense does this gel with trans people being 'left alone,' if it imposes on people who are trying to compete on something like a fair playing field?
Because blanketing a whole town with flags that represents your identity is almost fundamentally opposed to the concept of 'being left alone.' By this very act you are demanding people confront, acknowledge, accept, and support your particular beliefs. In so doing, you are requiring them pay attention, which is the opposite of leaving you alone.
Similarly when you make biological females wax your penis. That's not 'wanting to be left alone.' Nor is insisting to be allowed into a women's changing room with pubescent females. If this isn't some version of culture warring, then what is it?
You don't get to call it 'defensive' and then literally threaten to take people's kids away for failure to comply with your beliefs.
Or appoint openly trans officials to high ranking federal government positions seemingly only on the basis of their trans identity. This is not behavior that implies a desire to be 'left alone.' It is being openly stated there:
What is 'the faith' in this case?
"Just want to be left alone" but if you disagree with them, people at the very highest levels of government are ready to come for you.
I don't know that you're even arguing in good faith, but assuming you are, please put forward a plausible narrative of the last twenty years in which the right is the side that pushed trans issues to the forefront of public conciousness as a culture war issue.
I think this is a major part of the disagreement. Genetic testing for Y chromosomes is not exactly something done often. Literally checking people's genitals to determine which sex-segregated group they belong in as opposed to relying on appearance of secondary characteristics which can be faked with varying levels of success (generally much easier for trans men than trans women, the latter usually requiring some amount of surgery to pull off) or just trusting their identification or (possibly faked) documents also seems like an escalation.
Yes, this is why one designs laws that punish defectors who manage to evade detection, since we choose NOT to adopt more intrusive measures and trust people to follow generally accepted social edicts. You're just quibbling about the enforcement mechanism, not the validity of the norm it enforces.
A trans person who wants to be 'left alone' need only choose the bathroom or facility that corresponds to their biological sex and I daresay they will be left alone. Maybe they're a bit offput because social norms aren't 'accepting' their identity, but we COULD have a discussion to weigh the costs/benefits of accepting their identity vs. enforcing said norms.
But we HAVEN'T had that discussion and at present CAN'T have that discussion because even attempting it will get you literally banned from most social media sites. And that's not the right doing the banning.
But you'll have a hard time convincing me that the left is willing to cede any ground on this debate.
Prisons, of all places, are CERTAINLY capable of checking people's genitals before admission, and yet:
https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/transgender-rikers-inmate-gets-7-years-for-raping-female-prisoner/
If the left is incapable of even admitting that there exist valid reasons to keep people born with penises out of facilities delegated specifically for people who menstruate (I don't know what the most up-to-date prog terms are and don't care enough to check) then THEY are the source of the disagreement here.
But then again, if they admit to such valid reasons, this pretty much unravels the entire "your gender identity is what you believe and say it is!" logic.
Back a few years ago I saw multiple social media posts along the lines of this selfie of a trans man in a woman's restroom with a caption asserting the absurdity of that belief. Following the hashtags in that tweet finds some similar ones (although mostly a lot of screenshots of that one as far as I can tell).
Again, you're just quibbling about the enforcement mechanism, not the validity of the norm it enforces.
Do you think there are valid reasons for the social norm of penis-havers and people of menstruation being assigned separate lavatory facilities?
Why should the extant status quo be altered?
Just to be clear, you're asserting that the person in the photo I linked should indeed use the women's bathroom? And you expect that to be the popular (or at least red tribe) consensus?
I'm rejecting the claim that that was ever the actual status quo.
I have one of those for you too. According to your rules, which bathroom should this person use:
https://twitter.com/pic/media%2FFi6TZG1XEBIcEvu.jpg%3Fname%3Dsmall
That link is broken for me, it just says "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else.". Maybe try linking to the tweet instead of the image from the tweet? Or doing a Google Image search on the image to see if you can find it hosted elsewhere.
Ah, the utterly demonic "feature" of this site, that replace nitter with twitter links, strikes again. Try this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fi6TZG1XEBIcEvu?format=jpg&name=small
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I do not assert that. I dare you to show me where I asserted or implied that.
MY assertion is that the entity that owns the property in question can set up it's bathrooms however it likes and have whatever policy regarding gendered usage they care to, and it's up to them to enforce such policies. I think passing laws regarding bathroom usage on private property is actively stupid and detrimental in the vast majority of cases.
However I think there are simple and logical reasons to have gender-segregated lavatories, which are mostly related to the comfort of the females, especially females accompanied by children.
I think similar reasons apply even more starkly in, e.g. women's sports and in prisons (and I am not a fan of the whole concept of prisons, either). Bathrooms are just the ur-example that tends to impact everyone.
I'm rejecting the claim that the right is the side that brought this matter to the forefront of the culture war. I'm claiming that the left deliberately pivoted to and advanced the transgender rights cause immediately after achieving victory on the same-sex marriage matter in mid-2015.
So what, then, do you believe the 'status quo' on this issue was prior to 2015? As I asked at the outset, what narrative of the last 20 years do you think shows the right pushing these issues and the left merely defending?
Accepted. I conceded this point to you in a different reply to you in this thread where you provided evidence for it.
I made some attempt at answering this in a reply to someone else in this thread.
I apologize for the misunderstanding. I did not mean to put words into your mouth. The position you assert does not appear to be a popular one, so going further would be delving into your personal position, which is unlikely to shine much light on the greater culture war.
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Yes. That proves we used have a high trust society, where people expected everyone to follow the rules without having to be verified, not that we as a society used to believe in the concept of "gender identity", by which we decided to segregate our bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, and prisons.
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I think the majority of trans people probably do want to just be left alone. But the loudmouth activists, and the mentally ill, have captured the microphone and are the ones getting all the publicity, and then you have the cis 'allies' who want to be patted on the head as one of the Good Ones who are marching right alongside them in the increasingly bananas demands.
To me, this is what should be front and center in any discussion about trans issues or more broadly the culture war. The so-called "pro-trans" activists have absolutely no credibility when it comes to representing what trans people actually want. They didn't take a poll of all trans people, they didn't win an election held by trans people, they didn't even take some survey of a randomly selected distribution of trans people. As it is now, none of these things might even be possible, since we don't have some Great List of All Trans People that we can refer to.
It's just some people, some of them trans, claimed really loudly that the things they want are the things that are good for trans people. This isn't "pro-trans" in any meaningful way, and neither is opposing them "anti-trans" in any meaningful way.
So maybe a majority of trans people just want to be left alone. We have no way of knowing. What we do know is that there's no reason to believe that what any activist says has any sort of relationship to what the majority of trans people want.
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Most likely. But that position blows up the claim that its the right who opened up this particular culture war front.
The left, once they won on same-sex marriage pivoted to this specific battle and pushed it forward with aplomb, anything the right did was directly in response to that.
The left pushed it forward? To my memory, the North Carolina "bathroom bill" was what pushed the trans rights discussion to the national stage. You apparently remember things differently? Wikipedia does mention various events leading up to the passage of that bill.
Yes, it is right there in your link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Facilities_Privacy_%26_Security_Act#Background_and_passage
The right was responding to a direct action the left took in favor of removing the status quo.
"Oh, but the right escalated it!"
Okay. Remember what happened after that?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/13/obama-public-schools-transgender-access-restrooms
Or is it ONLY an escalation when the right does it?
But let's wind back the clock a bit further:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-quiet-transgender-revolution/2015/11/30/6879527e-95e4-11e5-b5e4-279b4501e8a6_story.html
Obama being the same guy who ran on the concept of marriage being between a man and a woman then oversaw the enshrinement of same-sex marriage into the constitution. Remember?
You notice that the left isn't HIDING the fact that it is pushing this agenda? Indeed, celebrating it? Back in late 2015?
Obama wasn't doing all this stuff in response to the right attacking transgender persons or passing laws that oppressed transgenders in particular.
He was doing it because, as mentioned, THE LEFT IMMEDIATELY PIVOTED FROM SAME SEX MARRIAGE TO TRANSGENDER RIGHTS. As stated multiple times now.
This is a basic fact that I am pretty convinced on, and you've presented no evidence to change my mind.
Indeed, it looks like the left was planning all along on this tactic, and what we're seeing now is simply the continuation of their long-term strategy.
Thanks for the reference. That answers my question by providing actual evidence that the political discussion of trans rights in the past ~decade was in fact not an out-of-the-blue move by the right.
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The original pushing forward of LGBT issues was actually still done with gay rights, when they sued that Colorado bakery, and we went from "just leave us alone" to "bake the cake, bigot".
As for trans issues, was the enstunnening and enbravening of Caitlyn Jenner before or after the bathroom bill?
Quoting Wikipedia:
The NC bathroom bill passed March 23, 2016. The Wikipedia article claims it was in response to a Charlotte city ordinance passed February 22, 2016. Both of those dates are after April 2015, so I guess Caitlyn Jenner coming out as trans was first.
(I honestly did not know who Caitlyn Jenner was past "famous trans woman" until looking up the Wikipedia article to make this post.)
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I mean, have you tried getting anything through to Twitter activists? They will call LGBT people bigots just as easily as straight white men for disagreeing with the agenda. In short, I agree, but I'm not sure we chill trans people can do much about it.
I will say there's a few concessions I'd really like, such as having gender neutral cubicles available as standard (often there's a disabled bathroom that works for that, but also often not).
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