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One of the things I've noticed about the media is how they define the narrative by promoting the things that people should be talking about, rather than simply dismiss and ignore. Case in point:
AP News: "New law puts Kansas at vanguard of denying trans identities on drivers licenses, birth certificates"
Note that it's about how trans people must use the correct gender marking (i.e. gender assigned at birth), rather than their own preferred gender, on their drivers' licenses.
I notice that I'm confused as to what "transgender rights" are, and what rights specifically transgender people are demanding that Americans don't already have. Trans people have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for instance. However, the demand that other people refer to you with a specific designation is not really a natural right, and in fact, suppressing or compelling the speech of others is a violation of other people's rights to free speech.
The question of if gender can "change" is purely philosophical and not something that can be settled by research. I can't begin to imagine how research could settle it, unless the research in question is from a hyper-advanced sci-fi future where reversible body modification is possible with no ill side effects.
Is the contradiction here that they can't be protecting women if they don't use favorable labels? If we accept that premise (which I don't), then surely calling women "menstruators" is also not protecting them, but that terminology has been advanced in the name of being inoffensive to trans-identifying males.
I love the multiple layers of lies that get packed into this one sentence. It's like a masterclass in lying while saying something that is technically true.
First, attributing it to unspecified "transgender people" in general. So you can't blame the journalist for printing this statement if it's blatantly false, he is just the messenger.
Second, attributing any supposed harassment from others to carrying ID that "misgenders" them, rather than other factors. They're painting this world where a trans woman (man who says he is a woman) is just like a woman in every other respect of the word, except that he just happens to have "M" on his license, and that causes him to be unduly questioned. In reality, a trans-identifying male can be spotted from a mile away, and if he was ever asked about it (which IME most people are too polite to even do), it was because he was clocked as a man and it's obvious to everyone that he's a man.
Finally, the assertion that they face violence. (To be clear, I mean violence as in physical violence, something that can at the very least be legally categorized as assault. I don't believe that mere speech is violence.) I am going to assert that there are vanishingly few cases where a trans person has faced violence simply on the basis of being trans and nothing else. Out of all the cases I've seen, they faced violence for other reasons, such as being the aggressor or for being involved in sex work.
I'm not saying it's impossible or hasn't happened, but I just haven't seen a case yet that could support the assertion that there are people who want trans people dead or genocided. There are no roaming death squads of extremists hunting down trans people. Being a trans person is quite a safe demographic in America. By and large, most people just don't care about trans people, but they are interested in making sure that trans people don't inflict negative externalities on society.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, we have the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Why the quotes around biological reproductive system? Are biological reproductive systems not a well-defined, scientifically-grounded concept?
My bigger point is just asking why anyone should even care in the first place, including trans people themselves. If I was trans, I would shrug and just accept the "M" designation on my license. To the extent that I would have a problem with the current state of affairs, I would find that the entire licensing regime that the government imposes on the people -- forcing them to register and pay fees in order to drive and participate in society -- is the actual problem here, not merely an unpreferred gender marker. But my stance is that it's not worth it to fight the licensing regime and it's better to comply. Hence, too, I wouldn't care about having the "M" on my license. It seems rather silly to me to question and reject one social construct (gender) while being completely subservient to another (driver's licenses).
And my biggest point is that this shouldn't even be worthy of discussion. If you're going to accept that the government has the right to force you to get licensed, who cares what kind of silly labels they give you? But a mainstream news article publishing this as a headline implies that it's a newsworthy item, a topic of controversy, something that people should care about even though it's really not going to have an impact on anyone's life.
You can go into just about any 4chan thread to convince yourself of the existence of such people. It's just that once you filter out the LARPing, the incompetent, the cowardly and the ones who rationally decide that the legal consequences are not worth it, not a lot remain.
Either way, I don't think there is much productive discussion to be had from reheating this topic in its direct form for the nth time (it at best devolves into questions of whose feelings it is more important to protect, and more often just involves flag-waving and rallying the for/against troops for messages of support or outrage).
Instead, let me ask a different but related question: In many European cultures, it is common practice that people who hold academic degrees (in particular PhDs) can list them with their name everywhere, replacing the appellation (Mr/Mrs/Ms) where available. So your doorbell, passport, ID etc. would say "Dr. Smith". This conveys not only bragging rights and a culturally reinforced feeling of achievement, but also a lot of practical advantages in everyday life: bureaucrats are nicer to you, postal workers are less likely to break your package, neighbours are less likely to call the police if you barbecue on your balcony at 2AM. Usually, who is allowed to put "Dr." is quite stringently regulated, with steep penalties: it is tied to degree program accreditation for native universities, and for foreign ones there is usually an extremely long list of arcane criteria involving research intensity ratings and what-not, which also sometimes requires you to pay money to some local agency to issue a document certifying that your foreign degree conveys the right to be consider a "Dr." nationally for this purpose.
Now suppose you were a resident of a European country, but had studied at a US university. Let's say you are also reasonably invested in US politics. You learn that your country has recently updated its title carrying accreditation rules, so now only PhDs from US universities that have [sufficiently strong, sufficiently subdued] DEI initiatives are accepted. If you do not have your documents updated and promptly remove the "Dr." from your doorbell, you risk steep administrative fines, or worse. How do you feel about this? Do you think it is fair game or are you going to protest?
To begin with, in what ways do you figure this scenario is similar, and in what ways do you think it is essentially different from the gender ID one?
It's interesting you mention that because we had a minor local kerfuffle here that made the news because someone dared to refer to a local official by his first name rather than Dr. They had to publicly apologize and everything. To me, people who insist on it come off as petty and pretentious. The US is famously egalitarian in generally eschewing the peerage system and delineating class by using titles. It's far more common to use first names even with your medical doctor. To insist otherwise creates a separation, the old idea of "how you treat your betters." So it's very much a class-based issue, so I don't think it's comparable to what trans people are asking.
Otherwise I will just say I've known one trans person in my life. I do believe the issue caused intense distress. I know there's been a trend of people "jumping" on the trans bandwagon and basically adopting it as if it was a sub-identity like goth or whatever. This person wasn't one of those. They were a full adult, very reserved, Christian and generally conservative, and they didn't tend to really reveal anything private about themselves. So it was quite a shock when they came out. They weren't out to score political points or be trendy or live out a fetish or whatever you might be thinking. They just wanted to live authentically, to heal whatever psychic suffering they struggled under. I don't know how much counseling or whatever they underwent. At the end of the day, if you care for someone as a person, you accept what they tell you about themselves. So I am respectful and kind to them and treat them as the gender they're presenting as.
But you'll notice I haven't actually used a gendered pronoun here to talk about them because, yes, it's not something I'm wholly comfortable with. While personally I'm on the side of compassion and acceptance, I understand that has very little to do with what policies are correct. Sex-segregated spaces are a thing for a reason and I think those should be preserved. Same thing with sports. There need to be much stronger guardrails on medical interventions rather than automatic total affirmation, and I'm glad to see signs of changes there. The drivers license thing I could go either way on. If you're arresting someone, you need to know whether to house them with the women or the men. But if you're just looking to identify someone or circulate their description, you need to know what they're presenting as. Having M on a drivers license seems like it hinders identification if they're walking around presenting as female.
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Is that the case outside Germany and Austria?
I can't recall having ever seen it anywhere else and quite a few people make fun of Germans for that (eg. Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Someone). Sure, in academic and some professional contexts you would say Dr Someone but not in normal life. Unless you were German, of course.
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I've long made the comparison between "gender" and titles. I think it was one of my early moderator stances on slatestarcodex.
Butchering someone's title intentionally does seem like a mark of disrespect. But insisting someone else use a title is a form of social domination. "President" is a title as well.
Disrespect: Former reality TV star Donald Trump gave the SOTU address.
Neutral: Donald Trump's SOTU address spoke on these topics...
Domination: Any news agency that does not refer to President Trump as President Trump in their articles will not be invited to the white house press corps briefings.
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From the other side, to take your example of "can you call yourself doctor?", the demand to change identity documents to reflect a fake status is as if someone who didn't go to university, didn't have a PhD, and was not otherwise qualified no matter if it's DEI or not, was sticking up "I am Doctor Smith, address me as such" on their doorbell and letters and the rest of it.
Whatever about driving licences, I do think that "I want to change my birth certificate so it says Mom and Dad had a baby girl on 17th September 1978 in Wenatchee Maternity Hospital at 3:45 a.m. and not a baby boy" is not permissible. A birth certificate is either a statement of fact or not. If we're going to make legal documents like marriage and turn it into "whatever you feel makes you happy, be that two guys can get married, six people are too a real marital unit, or boys will be girls and girls will be boys, sure thing and paperwork is just fiction depending on how you feel at any particular moment in time", then what is even the point of having registers?
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Can you give an example? The typical chud joke is mocking the high suicide rates of the group, not threatening to kill them. I don't go to 4chan, so I might end up surprised, but I'm pretty skeptical your claim can be substantiated by clicking on a random thread there.
Genocidal intent also has to differ between 'If I had a button that would instantly delete Group A, would I press it' and actual committed violence.
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You can just call yourself doctor, nobody cares. You can't suddenly start practicing medicine or teaching at a university, but nobody will stop you from calling yourself that.
Punishable with up to 1 year of jail e.g. in Germany; and yes, if your Karen neighbour figures out you were not technically allowed to, she will absolutely report you.
Yeah, but over there misgendering is also punishable with rather large fines.
It is? Hot damn. Then it would actually be rather dangerous...if "trans people" actually existed, outside of a few basement dwellers nobody ever sees in daylight.
Yup, €10K, thanks to the recently(ish) passed Selbstbestimmungsgesetz. It already resulted in a peak-Germany situation where a neonazi got jailed for neonazism, had a sudden sentencing-day transition, and started suing people for being referred to as anything other than a stunning and brave woman.
Eh, much like everywhere else, the average transgender case changed from weird middle-aged dude that likes to throw on a dress, to autistic adolescent girl having trouble making sense of her place in the world.
It's common enough that I've actually seen the latter organically (i.e. not because I'm obsessed with the subject)
I recall that you have some OPSEC in place, so no sweat if you refuse to answer, but where?
Here in the Provinz, there just aren't any. I mean, for sure they are somewhere, we do have the internet after all and social contagions do spread, but it doesn't look like they go outside enough to be encountered in the wild. Or the whole pronouns business is after all not important enough to actually make it public in person.
I think some time ago I PMed you where I was at. It's not exactly rural, but my impression is it's still seen as relatively conservative. I think the girl's father lives in one of the wokest parts of the country though, so that could have contributed to the contagion.
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That is not the point; 4bpp is specifically analogizing the overnight invalidation of documents where you called yourself "Dr." to the overnight invalidation of ID papers which included transgender people's chosen genders instead of their sex. In either case, it seems inordinately disruptive to the lives of the people involved, even if one were in favor of phasing out the practice as far as issuing new documents is concerned.
I think this interpretation stretches credulity enormously. You don’t go out and picket over minor changes in procedure, even if it is annoying; you do so for perceived loss of privilege (the inability to use the Dr. prefix as a signifier).
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I suppose I would feel stung from having invested so much into a title that is now less useful, but it's not as if me removing "Dr." from everywhere means that I no longer have a PhD. I might protest, but only to the extent of making my voice heard. I don't think it would be a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and I would probably have bigger things in my life to worry about.
The big difference is that I can't see there being a good reason for the change in PhD accreditation, especially retroactively. Meanwhile, changing back the definition of gender to be the one that billions of people have understood for thousands of generations, and which is rooted in biological reality, makes sense to me.
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