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This frequently made point is over stated, at least unless by 'conservatives' you mean the online presence rather than the actual constituents . Conservatives with daughters want their daughters to be able to compete and while I've met plenty of liberal parents with kids in sports nearly every conservatives parents I've met has had their kids do sports. Sports in general are conservative leaning(this again is not to say that most normie left leaning people aren't also involved)
I always find this comparison facile, the men's sports are profitable, they subsidize other parts of the school not the other way around.
And without the conservative railing this might not have happened, and it still doesn't seem fair. Fairness really matters in sports, violating it is a big deal. Did you actually ever play sports growing up? It takes a substantial amount of time to be competitive, undermining that with unfair practices is crushing. You can see how upset unfairness makes whenever a referee makes a call that people think is incorrect.
Of course you don't, they'd be canceled.
Like all appeals to "Why do you even care about this? It's so unimportant". The response is obvious. If it's not important and we care more than you do then let us have our way. If you think it is actually important enough to fight over then drop this shaming act.
There is actually an asymmetry here that invalidates this argument, because the pro-trans contingent and the anti-trans one claim to be defending different terminal values rather than arguing in opposite directions over the same one. The pro-trans camp will say that trans representation in women's sports is important because [grand matters of fairness and justice in our society]; the anti-trans camp, on the other hand, generally says that no trans representation is important because [small subset of women can't win prizes at little league competition anymore]. There's nothing particularly inconsistent about saying that caring a great deal about the former is natural and caring a great deal about the latter is suspect. Now, of course from our vantage point it is of course clear that the anti-trans camp actually also is in it for grand matters of how our society is structured, rather than a weird dogged obsession with giving cis women a small chance to win that cup; but game theory forces them to dissimulate and assert even when pressed that they are really in it for [giving more nice things to women] (a societally comparatively accepted goal) rather than [giving fewer nice things to mtf trans] (a goal that is easily painted as vindictive or outright Voldemortian).
Allow me to rephrase this as fairly as you have represented my position. The pro-trans camp tries very hard not to actually think of the ground truth of what transgenderism means. If they do the farce of trying to hold in their head that gender is both a social construct and also an innate characteristic will cause painful cognitive dissonance. So when a topic, like sports, comes up that noticing the physical reality of trans people comes up they just obfuscate and point to the applause lights of "We're doing something important to blah blah blah past injustice, blah blah blah equality blah blah blah representation". It doesn't matter even a little bit to them that the ground truth of what they're arguing for is impossible to justify. That including trans women in women's sports defeats the entire purpose of the division. It is not about women's sports at all to you, it is about dissolving the category and you do not care about the costs.
It is my opinion that there is literally no such thing as an MTF trans person. It is a made up category that will not exist in two decades. It is incoherent to reason about giving or taking things away from people who share a common memetic delusion. You and your allies have created this suffering you are attempting remedy.
I don’t think I understand you. There is obviously a group of natal males who feel something so viscerally that absolutely derailing their lives seems like a worthy alternative. I know several of them. Regardless of how you feel about their social and medical interventions, isn’t this a category?
How so? We group people by beliefs all the time: Democrats, conspiracy theorists, children who believe in Santa. Sometimes the beliefs are openly unfalsifiable. It is perfectly reasonable to discuss Christians as a group.
I've gone through this in another thread here but the general point is that this is a matter of memes and not reality. Men derailing their lives on totally false beliefs is not new and does not prove the beliefs. Otherwise the existence of monestaries would prove the existence of God. No one can transition from male to female there is no path between these two states.
Christians are people who believe in the divinity of Jesus christ, this is more akin to being told to call Jewish people "the chosen people", it implies I agree with the position. If you want I will admit to the existence of males who desire to be females.
MtF/trans woman (and FtM/trans men) are the commonly used terms for the phenomenon. Are there any other terms that you can use that would be understood? Otherwise you can add it to the list of many terms like horseshoe crab (not actually a crab), peanuts (actually a legume), mincemeat pie (has no meat), etc. If you tried to call peanuts “pealegumes” people would just be confused, even if you’d be right.
All models are wrong, but some models are useful - FtM/MtF (and FtNB/MtNB) is a handy way to identify a trans person. With older folks or those less steeped in LGBT issues, “trans man” or “trans woman” often provoke confusion - sometimes they think a trans woman is an FtM and vice-versa, while the full “female to male” terminology makes it explicit that the person started off as female and now appears male, or is attempting to, even if their biological sex isn’t actually male.
Suppose there is a crossroads in death valley that has no nearby resources. No access to water, the land is not arable, the soil makes building anything difficult and there are no natural resources. It would be irresponsible to name that place "gold hills California". It would imply to credulous people that there was a some good reason to move to this inhospitable place only for these prospective prospectors to live unnecessarily difficult lives. Not only is there no gold but the territory seems designed to create human suffering for its occupants.
You're saying "this crossroads exists, we might want to be able to refer to it, and us prospectors here call it gold hills". And you're right that such a territory plainly exists. But your proposed map of the territory seems to me to imply false and dangerous hope to travelers. And your recruitment drives at my kid's school to go dig fruitlessly in the dirt out there for the promise of riches is, I think, actively harming people.
And I harbor no ill will to the people if "gold hills". They're fellow citizens whom I believe to have bought into a false hope. They deserve to be helped, pitied and loved. But the continued delusion helps no one.
I will have to disagree on the implication that transition is fruitless and a false hope by comparing it to Death Valley. Many trans people are able to pass and integrate society successfully as members of the opposite sex (trans men generally moreso than trans women), and while medical science may not be advanced enough for a complete sex change with a functional reproductive system, HRT + surgeries are enough to improve mental healthcare outcomes. There may be no gold in the hills, but there’s at least some silver.
I recently read the Transsexual Phenomenon (link here: https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019-04-07_5ca961529c262_HarryBenjamin-TheTranssexualPhenomenon1copy.pdf ), a seminal work from 1966, and I would highly encourage you to skim through it as it’s a work on trans people that predates the current gender ideology lens, with none of the present terminology. It shows how the phenomenon clearly existed in what many conservatives think is the golden age of America - and the amount of harm the system did to people who didn’t fit into the sexual and gender norms of the period. Psychotherapy to make trans people desist was seriously attempted back then and just didn’t work - as a medical clinician, the author of the work found HRT and possible surgeries to be the most effective remedy for many, and this was in post-war USA.
One interesting element he mentions is how there’s a scale of being transgender, and that some patients need no intervention at all, some are helped simply by taking estrogen but otherwise living their lives as male, while some should indeed have the full gender transition including surgery. I personally agree that current approaches and societal mood are perhaps too quick to push people into a transition pipeline and that not all people with gender identity dysfunction need to go all the way - a scale like Harry Benjamin proposed, revised for more contemporary mores, has tremendous value and would perhaps curtail some of the excesses of the current approach.
As a person who’s suffering from gender dysphoria and is undergoing medical transition, what delusion am I suffering from? I know my biological sex, I’m very much aware that I’m not female, but the hormones I’m taking clearly are having a positive effect. Gender dysphoria is an awful psychological condition that can be incredibly debilitating and intense, and I’ve tried repressing for years, I’ve tried going to the gym, I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried living as a feminine gay man, I’ve tried reading TERF blogs and conservative rhetoric to the point it became self-harm, but HRT is the only thing that managed to reduce the daily feeling of disgust and despair I had towards my body. I know very well it’s not perfect and that I won’t become a real 100% woman, even if I may pass, but why should I deny myself what’s currently the most effective medical treatment for my condition?
Perhaps I can summarise; as a trans person, I don’t think I’m the opposite sex in any way, instead I’m in deep distress over being the sex I am, and I take medication that alleviates that distress.
This is, I think, the core of our disagreement. I think there is pyrite in those hills.
I can at times be talked into believing in some quite rare version of gender dysphoria analogous to body integrity disorder. The 'Truscum' faction of the the trans discourse I think makes the most sense of any 'pro-trans' faction by quite a large margin. But I very quickly lose patience for this when it's used as cover for the excesses of the much larger vocal and powerful rest of the 'pro-trans' movement. Transwomen in women's sports is one such excess, it is an attempt to pass pyrite off as gold on the open market - no matter how much it matches the luster and no matter how much you adjust the alloy in it to match the weight they are simply different elements/compounds. Pyrite at a fundamental level is different than gold and if you try to use it in electronics as you would use gold your electronics will not function. Likewise males and females have fundamental differences and society has developed special cases for these difference in things like sports, romance, prisons ect. We could perhaps take a look at some of these but it needs to actually be a discourse, it cannot be demands by people who refuse to even acknowledge fundamental difference and society is not in a place where we can have this kind of frank debate.
And more important than how we handle relative trivialities like sports we need to address the faction of the 'Pro-trans' side of the aisle that is actually running the narrative because they don't agree with you about this whole dysphoria requirement thing and without that all of the points you have made fall apart. To be as frank as possible and truly with no joy, if the trolley problem is people like you with Dysphoria on one track and an order of magnitude or three more kids who will be pushed down an unnecessary and life altering transition that they would not have wanted without the messaging on the other track it does not look go for you. Part of why I say this, and why I find the current state of the discourse so distressing is that I recognize that there but for the grace of god go I. I was precisely the kind of kid that would have ended up being put on blockers as a child and the kind of kid that would have become a zealot for the "pro-trans" side. I now know, and I would not have known in this counterfactual, that I grow up to be very happy to be a man. I think this kind of susceptible kid outnumbers people like to greatly and I am very unimpressed with the guardrails in place. It's like the section in Scott's old old blog post The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo Where he goes into the dangers of eliminating all false negatives at the expense of sending runny noses into surgery.
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