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On what basis do you jump to "fantasy"?
I posit that discrimination against the trans is a great example of what the resident right-wingers like to gloss as "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is", and complain about endlessly if the other side does it. Here, it's even more egregious: it can hardly be simultaneously true, as right-wingers typically believe, that trans women naturally evoke revulsion, and that any adverse social consequences that they experience are imaginary.
No, it's not contradictory at all.
They have a (delusional) persecution complex related to their dysphoria. They believe the world is out to get them and deny their innate female nature.
But what is actually happening is that the majority of trans individuals are mentally ill men, who are obvious fetishists/have no hope of passing/who were autistic to begin with. This is a perfectly reasonable set of criteria to discriminate against. They want to be treated like women, identified as women.
But they're ugly women. Ugly women with penises. Most tend to call those kind of women 'men'. To come to any other conclusion is fantasy.
And because of this obvious fact, these individuals demand as much social deference and privilege as possible to prevent their soap bubble self-identification from popping. The oppression they are experiencing is coming from inside of their own heads - not from meany transphobes, but that internal voice that is screaming they are living a life of deception, aspiring to something they cannot have.
They are no more persecuted for their self identity then the man who thinks he's Jesus, or that lizardpeople are the world elite.
So? It would be perfectly fair to say that a trans-Jesus detransitioned because of persecution, too. Persecution does not need to be baseless.
Do you even notice what you are saying yourself? The paper quoted in the original post says
and then the response that you are here defending is calling it "fantasy discrimination". And yet, you proceed to say yourself, "This is a perfectly reasonable set of criteria to discriminate against." If this is not "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is", then what is? Do you actually have an argument, or does the driving principle just amount to "this post was directionally anti-trans, so I should agree; the post arguing with it must have been pro-trans, so I should disagree"?
In common parlance, persecution is understood to mean being harassed etc. for no good reason. Per Wiktionary:
If there's a nationwide manhunt for a convicted murderer who escaped from prison, no one says that the murderer is being "persecuted", even though the people hunting for him obviously want to do harm to him (in the form of arresting him and returning him to prison).
"To discriminate" simply means "to tell two different things apart" e.g. a discriminating taste in fashion. In common parlance, it's often used to mean "unfairly discriminated against". I presume the paper was using the word "discrimination" in the latter sense of the term, but perhaps @crushedoranges was arguing that, while certain trans people may have been discriminated against, they have not been unjustly discriminated against as they claim. (To illustrate: if you don't get picked for a basketball team because you're short and unfit, in a very real sense you have been discriminated against — but outside of the Harrison Bergeron universe, few would argue that you have been unjustly discriminated against.)
In my experience, trans activists tend to characterise a lot of perfectly banal behaviours as "transphobic", such as describing trans women as "biologically male" or similar. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that a trans-identifed male reported that he was stopping his transition because of "discrimination" on the part of his family members, but if you were to dig into this "discrimination", you would find that it amounted to the person's family members saying something along the lines of "I love you and I am deeply sympathetic to your situation, but it's a simple statement of fact that, given your physiognomy, you are unlikely to ever convincingly pass as female, and if you medically transition you will probably regret it a few years down the line". This is "discrimination" in the sense that it's true that tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed men have a much harder time passing as female than men with none of these characteristics; but I don't consider it unjust discrimination, any more than not picking the short unfit person to play on your basketball team.
The study is saying discrimination happens and that it functions as a motive for de-transitioning. In JTarrou's first comment, he says the discrimination is a "fantasy" and it's not a real external reason to de-transition. But it seems to me that even "not-unjust" discrimination can function as a motive to cause people to de-transition. So at the very least you are using a different definition than him, would you agree?
I think being told "because you are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, it will be exceptionally difficult for you to convincingly pass as female no matter what medical interventions you undergo" might strictly speaking qualify as "discrimination" (in the same way that a short, unfit person not getting picked for the basketball team is "discrimination") – and yet it's so far removed from what ordinary people think of when they hear a scary word like "discrimination" that "fantasy discrimination" seems like a reasonable gloss.
Sure, if that's the modal "discrimination" they face. But it isn't.
Let's explore your scenario further. Telling them "because you are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, it will be exceptionally difficult for you to convincingly pass as female no matter what medical interventions you undergo" is not really where the discrimination occurs.
If my friend is tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and he wants to transition to be a woman, I'd try to use that argument to dissuade him. Why does that argument hold any persuasiveness at all? It's because we know if he actually transitions, he/she would face great adversity in the society as a manly, ugly, non-passing trans-woman.
And if they are tall, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and they decide to transition, but half-way through, pre-op, they feel the society treat them as a freak, or a sexual deviant, or mentally ill, or just an extremely ugly woman, and they decide to not go through with it. Is that really inconceivable?
I'm having a hard time parsing this. I'm sure it must suck for people to think you're mentally ill when you aren't. I'm sure it must suck for people to treat you as if you're mentally ill when you aren't.
But for most of its history, the concept of being transgender was seen as synonymous with suffering from gender dysphoria (or, as previously known, "gender identity disorder"). I have it on good authority (including from people in this very thread) that medics don't just hand out HRT to anyone who requests it, but rather that these medications are rigorously gatekept and people who want to take them subjected to a painstaking screening process, weeding out the malingerers from those legitimately suffering from gender dysphoria. So when I see a clearly male person walking down the street wearing clothes cut for a woman's body, and with visibly budding breasts because he's recently commenced a course of HRT — like, statistically, it's reasonable for me to assume that he's been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and hence mentally ill, right? Are you suggesting that it's a form of "discrimination" for people to correctly identify that mentally ill people are, in fact, mentally ill, and treat them accordingly? In a different context we would call that "accommodation".
"I suffer from a mental illness that made me want to do X, but it made me sad when people started treating like I have a mental illness, so I decided to stop doing X." I don't understand any part of this.
I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but if you start your transition, people treat you like an ugly woman, and you decide to detransition specifically for that reason, it sounds like you don't want to be a woman so much as you want to be a hot woman. In other words, you're not exactly beating the autogynephilia allegations.
And if you consider autogynephilia a real thing (I certainly do) and think that someone who experiences it is a sexual deviant (certainly that's true in the statistical sense that it's a rare condition; your mileage may vary on the "moral disgust" definition of "deviance"), it's a statistical probability that a given trans woman experiences autogynephilia, with estimates ranging from 60-75% of trans women.
This sort of reminds me of a column I read years ago in the heavy metal magazine Terrorizer. They had a monthly column written by a standup comedian (whose name escapes me) who was a big metalhead and looked the part: long hair, piercings, tattoos etc. He was discussing a piece of legislation currently being debated in the House of Commons which would essentially make facial piercings and tattoos protected characteristics, and it would be illegal to discriminate against people with these features. In this column, he said that this was ridiculous: by getting facial tattoos or piercings you are making a conscious decision to deviate from the beauty standards and social expectations of your community, and you can't have your cake and eat it. If you want to work in a customer-facing job, don't get face tats. No one forced you to. If you really want a face tat, you must accept the trade-offs that come with that decision.
Like it or not, this is also true of anyone who chooses in an unconventional manner, which includes all obviously male people wearing clothes cut for women's bodies. If you're interviewing for a role as an account manager (for which you are well-qualified) and you walk into the interview wearing a clown suit, I suppose strictly speaking you have been "discriminated against" if the interview panel immediately thinks "freak" and decide not to proceed with your application. We're expected to make a special carve-out for any male person who purports to "identify as" a woman and dresses accordingly, but I'm not entirely sure why. It's not like they're compelled to wear clothes cut for women's bodies, and many of them aren't even the least bit discreet about the fact that they're doing so to satisfy an erotic urge.
Did your argument change from "they are not being discriminated" to "they are and it's good"? Because that how it reads.
In the previous comment your argument seemed to be the discrimination shouldn't count because they are trivial and tiny, but in this one it seems like you are agreeing that the discrimination is material, but that it's justified. If my interpretation is wrong, please clarify.
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