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It's not hard to build trans acceptance on an equally stable foundation though. It's not a popular move for TRAs, but I've always felt the "socially/legally adopted sex" model of transness is the way with the least problems, since it really doesn't commit one to any particular metaphysical view of transness, which can then be left as a matter of individual conscience. In a liberal democracy, that seems like a totally satisfactory way to deal with trans people.
It allows for "man" and "woman" to refer centrally to mature gametic males and females, and peripherally to those adopting the "socio-legal sex" of the same, the same way that "parent" refers centrally to biological parents, and peripherally to step-parents and adoptive parents.
Obviously there are differences between "adoptive sex" and "adoptive parenthood." First, the legal fiction of "adoptive parenthood" is justified by the good the parent does for the child and the benefit this provides society as a whole, while the legal fiction of "adoptive sex" would probably be best justified by a harm reduction model for the minority of dysphoric trans people (although I think a transhumanist or ultra-tolerant liberal perspective could also work in a pinch - I just doubt that that would be sufficiently popular with enough people to serve as a proper basis.)
The first-person psychology of the two is very different as well. An adoptive parent probably doesn't consider themselves a parent until after the legal process, whereas a trans person usually considers themselves to already be their identified sex before the law has recognized it.
But I don't think this model would be in any way "unstable" and it doesn't ask the 95 IQ redneck to believe any metaphysical propositions to strain credulity. It doesn't even commit us to maximal trans inclusion - we could have a legal fiction of adopted sex, and still distinguish between adoptive women and natal women where we consider it necessary for fairness or safety.
I appreciate the formulation but I think it has problems. The entirety of the reason it seems less controversial or imposing is because you aren't actually answering the policy questions that cause the debate to go red hot. It's essentially just responding 'no' to the "are trans women women?" question, so the super straight model but on all dimensions. On the other end it doesn't really buy the redneck anything at all either, it's just weird men in dresses that call themselves something different, maybe with some state enforced normalization. It only manages to be consistent by not actually engaging in all the places where other models bite bullets.
Can't the "bullet biting" just be done on a case by case basis? I see no issue with a negotiated settlement like:
Adding trans people to the list of protected classes in society, making it illegal to fire someone merely for being trans, or to deny them service on this basis.
Social transition allowed for minors, medical transition (including puberty blockers) banned or with many difficult hoops to obtain.
In public schools, trans minors participate on the sports team of their adoptive sex in non-contact, non-fighting sports. In fighting sports and contact sports, they participate with their natal sex.
For private sporting leagues, allow each league to judge for itself whether to be inclusive or exclusive.
Require all public schools and government buildings to have at least one unisex bathroom, and let private organizations do what they want regarding who can use what bathrooms. (Perhaps create standardized signage, or a sticker that can be used to let people know a bathroom is trans-inclusive or -exclusive.)
Keep all dangerous sex offenders, regardless of sex in male prisons.
Medical transition legal, but only covered under government healthcare for people with severe dysphoria. (Or limited to cost-effective options like hormone therapies.)
That would results in transgenders dominating every non-contact sport. Biological girls would have no chance at ever winning a sprinting or swimming championship. A lot of girls aren't going to be interested in sports if they have no hope of ever winning.
Admittedly, that line makes more sense in a permissive regime with medical transition for minors than the example set of a settlement I put together. Trans girls would possibly still dominate high school athletics after medical transition, but it would be a much closer competition, and it at least wouldn't be dangerous.
The main thing I wanted to highlight was that a negotiated settlement could treat each hot button issue separately. There's no need to for a maximally inclusive approach, if we have good reasons for splitting things up differently.
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If you apply your principles in half the cases, you haven't applied your principles. So I don't think a "negotiated settlement" will work.
There's also the problem you have with immigration or gun control, where any "compromise" becomes the new status quo and you end up constantly compromising on the remaining uncompromised portion. This has sort of already happened.
My principal is that "translegalism" (i.e. "transness as socially/legally adopted sex") is a firmer basis for thinking through trans issues than most TRA models of transness (including transmedicalism, identity-only, etc.) And because we're only approaching transness as a legal fiction along the lines of adoptive parenthood, it makes sense for society to negotiate which rules will apply and which ones don't.
After all, there's no universally agreed upon answer to the question, "if a man marries and becomes a step-father, then divorces his wife, should it be legally permissible for him to marry his former step-daughter?" When we created the fictive kinship relationship of "step-fatherhood" we had to make a decision about that. It's just that that was decided so long ago, that most people have forgotten it was ever a debate.
So too, the translegalist approach will have thorny issues to decide about when trans people are relevantly similar to cis people of their legal sex, and when they are not. I don't think it's about not applying principles, it's about trying to craft a rule in line with a pluralistic, inclusive liberal democracy that doesn't force anyone to have to confess a creed they don't believe in.
I think this is only right, especially on the issue of immigration. There's no objectively right answer to "how many people should we allow into the country to become U.S. citizens", so it makes sense to allow voters to elect politicians who will debate the various pros and cons of each proposal and find an amount of immigration that they're comfortable with.
I agree a "translegalist" approach will result in an ongoing back and forth of compromises, with each "compromise" becoming a new status quo. But I don't see how that's avoidable. When rights are being handled by statute or legal precedence, and not by constitutional amendment, they'll always be open to "easy" revision. We could decide tomorrow to strip women of many rights and privileges but not the right to vote, and so too we could decide to create more rights and privileges for trans people or to strip them of existing rights.
All rights have some conflict with other rights, and a liberal democracy has to determine how best to deal with conflicts of rights when they arise.
Except without the "back and forth".
"Let's compromise on 50% of my demands." Once it's done, it becomes status quo and the next one is "let's compromise on 50% of my remaining demands" and they get 75%, 87.5%, etc. of their original demands by repeatedly "compromising".
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The issue is we then wrap around to these compromises not really being founded on a single coherent world model. The trans camp wants full social acknowledgement of their described reality, even the phrase "merely for being trans" falls apart if you don't agree that this is a thing someone can really be. It concedes the entire frame of the condition being a real thing, and any formulation that doesn't concede this would be unacceptable to the trans camp. It's an unstable equilibrium, once the foot is in the door on this stuff it's only a matter of time before sympathetic enough case in sympathetic enough jurisdiction erodes all of these compromises, the question will be asked "well are they women or not" and if you're not able to say "no" then none of these guardrails will survive scrutiny and if you are then they won't be acceptable to the trans camp.
You don't need to make it with reference to the condition - but to the legal status of being an adoptive man/woman.
That way, you can capture anti-trans discrimination either on the basis of natal sex, or legal sex. If an employer wouldn't fire someone for wearing a dress if they were a natal woman, they can't fire them if they wear a dress and are a legal woman. Etc., etc.
No need to acknowledge or favor anyone's version of reality. The "objective" legal reality of a person's recorded status becomes the basis for the discrimination claim.
I maintain it's only unstable because it is new. If the legislators craft a good enough foundation, there will be very little room for worrying about corner cases.
There is a debate now because the trans side is trying to frame it as all or nothing, but we can deal with things on an issue-by-issue basis or kick the issue to private groups or individuals to decide for themselves how they want to deal with things.
I think if the Federal government sets an example with how public schools and government buildings will be handled, as well as protecting against (at least) employment and housing discrimination, then we can leave it to states or private individuals to decide whether to have more protections than that. California and other Blue States could protect more, and more conservative states could be more restrictive anywhere not already covered by the Federal level.
I don't think this is really going to fool anyone.
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And from the perspective of your average Bubba or Jimbob or Boudreaux, biting bullets is why mental models exist in the first place. If it doesn't give us answers to the questions anyone actually cares about(is that an ugly chick who can use the woman's locker room while my teenaged daughter is in there, or is it a weirdo dude in a dress and a heck of a lot of makeup who should be prevented from entering?), it doesn't do its job.
I'm not sure I agree that any amount of biting bullets is necessary for the "socially/legally adopted sex" model to function. All that's required is clearly spelled out legal/social policy about where adopted sex matters, and where it does not.
The state could decide important things that need to be decided like what locker room an adoptive woman uses, how anti-discrimination laws will be interpreted re:adoptive sex, or which sports teams they will play on at the high school level in public schools, and then everything else could be left to private organizations to sort out. So for independent sporting bodies for adult athletics, they could all decide on a sport-by-sport or organization-by-organization basis whether it makes sense to group by adoptive sex or natal sex.
The solution lets everyone use their judgement outside of a small group of top-down decisions that remove any confusion for any involved.
I think the bathroom issue is one where, as a practical matter, enforcing a trans bathroom ban is too difficult. It would be much easier to allow people to use the bathroom or locker room of their adoptive sex, and then just make stricter rules about harassment and unacceptable behaviors in bathrooms. With sufficiently strict and well-publicized enforcement, I think it's the best compromise between privacy, safety and accommodation.
Why is accommodation something that’s worth compromising the other two things to accomplish?
I think the issue is more that privacy is the hardest thing to preserve if you want to not accommodate trans people.
If you make the rule "people must use the bathroom of the sex on their driver's license (which cannot be changed)", that would preserve privacy (compared to a genital inspector regime), but it would be a very easy system to game. All one would have to do is get a fake ID, which minors already do to get drinks before they turn 21. And it also ignores the fact that in the United States no one is required to carry an ID, and in many states no one can be compelled to show their ID if they don't want to.
Plus, it would result in the situation of passing trans people being forced to use a bathroom that might still make the occupants uncomfortable, and it has the issue that butch women might be harassed more in bathrooms by people doubting their right to be there.
What's your proposal for enforcing trans-exclusion in bathrooms, that is resource-efficient, doesn't create a whole bunch more bureaucracy, doesn't accidentally target gender-non-conforming cis women, and doesn't make anyone uncomfortable with their bathroom-mates?
I mean the answer is ‘people shouldn’t become trans. If someone obviously trans goes into the wrong bathroom, question them, and maybe Benny Butch can suck it up and deal with it because everyone else’s right to be normal comes before your right to be weird. If Caitlyn Jenner gets away with using the wrong bathroom, oh well, worse things have happened, but if ‘she’ shows ‘her’ penis off in the woman’s locker room that’s a much bigger deal that can be dealt with when the women report it.’
Does deputizing everyone to become informal bathroom police really make anyone safer? This just seems like a further realization of Freddie deBoer's Planet of Cops - another instance of the dictatorless dystopia where people are the wardens of their own prisons.
I don't think a lot of people will find your solution to butch women very satisfying either. And besides butch women, there's going to be the issue of naturally "masculine"-looking women. In your model the butch women are choosing to be "weird" and thus asking for it, but what about the unusually tall women, the ones with naturally square jaws, the ones with hirsutism? Those women aren't choosing to be weird, and they almost certainly outnumber transwomen by a significant margin. Do you really think that this is the best of all possible systems for keeping cis women safe, if it involves throwing a lot of innocent ciswoman victims under the bus, and telling them to just "suck it up" because they were cursed to look unconventional?
Why can't we just strengthen anti-harassment laws, and create institutional commitments to enforcing policies that keep women safe without trading off against other things?
I'm not aware of an epidemic of trans people harassing women in bathrooms. Even the much celebrated Loudon school case doesn't really suggest a trans exclusionist approach. The girl and boy were long-time sexual partners, and they had arranged to meet in the school bathroom for hook ups on several occasions. On the day of the incident, they had arranged to meet up again, but this time the girl wanted to cut things off, the boy didn't take kindly to her rejection and raped her. "Raped by a trans person I invited to meet with me in the bathroom, to tell them our bathroom hook ups are off" is hardly the typical example of what people fear when they imagine a trans woman invading women's spaces.
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