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They are, on the other hand, excellent tests for how we think about things.
The most plainly I can state my position on the matter is that I don't think I should feel morally obligated (less still, be legally obligated) to respect people's stated identities. Instead, I think my obligation to respect someone's identity extends as far as that identity is reflected in the actual reality of the individual and what they seem to wish to gain from using that identity.
I don't have a generalizable problem with trans-identified individuals. I know trans-identified individuals that are personally pleasant, have made an honest attempt to appear to be their chosen gender, and that require nothing onerous from anyone. As the saying goes, they just want to be left alone. I'm more than happy to provide them with the respect and decency that they want (and in my opinion) deserve.
My point is not that no one should have their stated identity respected, it's that there are examples of people who clearly have fake, illegitimate identification, and that this demonstrates that not all stated identities need to be respected by either individuals or the state. Where that line is will be a matter of legal wrangling and personal inclinations, but I reject the frame that allows a literal Nazi human-butcherer to convert to a Jewish woman when convenient.
If I identified as a heterosexual male and spent my weekends in gay bars picking up guys who I would then have sex with, then for people to refuse to respect my identity as a heterosexual male would be absolutely appropriate whether I liked it or not.
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Explain to me how this affects me? Like all the dudes around me pretend I am gay and thus? The ladies all pretend I'm gay even though they know I am not, so they accept my dates and then make out with me at the bar anyways until the best one "pretends" her way through our wedding and kids and we die together as a totally gay man has totally tricked himself into living like every happy straight man ever. Except he lived life on easymode because he could hang out with any woman at all times (even those with boyfriends which he then could steal away if he so wanted because the delusion only can be maintained up until the boner is in your vagina). What is this burden?
Gay men can't marry straight women?
I was alive in 1999. A person who acted entirely like a straight man, but there was a weird conspiracy theory that predominated that he is secretly gay wouldn't be that badly off.
But this isn't a consistent analogy at all. Trans women who are treated like men aren't worse off than normal men, except when they lash out and act crazy in the face of equal treatment.
No in your example they are, because they are punished for being straight and acting straight (I will cede that homosexuals were, in fact, punished for gay acts in the 90s, to some extent).
But a trans woman is a man, and thus when they are treated like a man, there is nothing odd happening, and no discrimination. They are asking for a special carve out wherein they, a man, are granted the privileges of women.
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I agree it's a good test, but if we are not extrapolating our thinking to the relevant larger things in this context, then what we can discuss becomes limited. I like the people I like and I dislike the people I dislike. There's not much there.
If someone I like has an identity, 'fake' or 'real', in whatever sense, I'm not all that fussed about it. If I like them and it's real to them then it's real to me no problem. Because I like them. If it's fake to the outgroup I don't care. So long as they are not harming the ingroup I'd want anyone I like to have everything they need. Especially if the perception is that what they need is coming from the outgroup in some way. (I mean, tl;dr: I tolerate my ingroup, not the outgroup.)
You made Madden an example because they are so very easily outgroupable. No one wants to own the criminally insane outside of extreme circumstance. But if Madden can be used to harm the prospects of the ingroup in some way then that will get called out. Which is the immediate perceptions trannies have whenever this kind of thing gets brought up. And I'd argue their perceptions are entirely correct.
If this topic is only about our personal likes, then we all dislike Madden and there is nothing more to be said. If this is not about our personal taste then it's about respecting people and their identities and how far one could or should go. The only reason this is a topic in modern discourse is because of trannies. This subject, if anything is to be discussed, can only be understood through the lens of trans-rights. And to that end the matter has already been settled.
Trannies will get ingrouped, they will be placed in womens prisons or an extremely expensive alternative. Some women will be raped as a consequence and that's fine. We already accept mass rape as an acceptable price for others to pay for our modern moral sensibilities. The potential fallout and harm that might be caused by a few women being raped in jail is chicken shit compared to what's already been done and celebrated in the name of ending segregation.
This is true and you don’t even have to go to desegregation for examples- the US largely accepts that lots of people will get raped in male prisons, after all. Extending it to female prisons is just equality of the sexes.
You're right.
My usual spiel relates to rapes, violent assault and murder, all of which are dramatically exasperated by race tensions and desegregation. But I forgot to mention the two latter ones.
On that front the issue of violence in prisons in general is separate to the additional violence added on top of that due to nothing other than desegregation. The amount of violence added due to that policy dwarfs anything trannies could do in a womens prison. So the meat of the argument is the comparison between those two policies.
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Umm, has this Nazi cannibal gay porn star taken any steps towards becoming Jewish? Unlike transgenderism, Jewishness has actual identity standards.
For religious purposes, would a penectomy be considered functionally equivalent to a circumcision (albeit a horrifically botched one)?
/s
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I don't know, the articles I looked at didn't really get into that. The JP one about kosher meals that I linked suggests that the bar is incredibly low though.
The claim that it's easier to determine if someone is Jewish than whether someone is a woman is something I could not have predicted taking seriously just a few years ago.
I mean, it seems like this person’s actual identity is ‘criminally insane’, so I’m comfortable saying they’re neither. Obviously the prison system has other ideas.
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I understand your position, and can sympathize with it as I have seen several examples of people claiming identities in bad faith. It runs into trouble, though, when you have to have a mini-trial to determine who's entitled to what.
Well, you only need a "trial" when the outcome is important, like which prison to send an inmate to. And we already have a trial system for that; seems like the judge is in the best position to determine which prison would be appropriate, alongside all the other aspects of sentencing.
But in normal life, if we just acknowledge that it's not Literal Genocide to occasionally use the wrong pronouns, no trial is needed. Sure, if you're one of the rare edge cases where people genuinely mistake what gender you prefer, then you might have to keep announcing it and correcting people. It sucks a little, but not a lot.
I don't think that's enough. It allows for mistakes, but not differences of opinion--it still allows someone to demand use of a pronoun.
Actually I think invoking mistakes here is a smokescreen. None of the trans issues that people are conerned about involve mistakes.
Well, they can demand it, but it's society's support that allows that demand to have teeth. Like @Walterodim says, we need to get back to the point where you had no moral/legal obligation to comply when somebody else tries to control you.
You're right about the rest of the trans issues. I realize I was being a bit naive - bathroom/changing room access, for instance, is both important and far too common to litigate. Ending cancel culture isn't going to help us find a compromise between the two sides of that debate...
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