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In the Culture Series by the sadly departed Iain M. Banks (not to be confused with his more mundane doppelganger Iain Banks) humans can decide to change sex entirely and actually become the opposite sex in a very real sense, they are exactly like someone born that sex including womb or sperm etc... Often couples that want 2 kids will take turns doing the gestating.
If humans go on long enough a perfect sex change will indeed be possible at a genetic level. Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then? How could they?
I say this as someone that thinks it is ridiculous that a man can DECLARE FEMALE Michael Scott BANKRUPTCY style and crush swimming records and smackdown college girls in basketball.
In my opinion, and the 'mainstream' tracks this as well, the current hormone mix is good enough for many transwomen to be indistinguishable from ciswomen. They may not all be 'pretty'; but the majority of them will have the hormonal and physical appearance of women as far as their secondary sex characteristics are concerned. The whole 'transwomen are women' and all that...
In general this debate is quite well settled at least from the perspective of the establishment and mainstream professional opinion. People may have issues with it, but I don't see this being overturned and I would predict that trans-rights will be even more embedded over time as the phenom becomes more normalised.
I don't. Seven or eight years ago I think it was South Carolina tried to pass a bathroom bill and the entire media and a shitload of huge companies and sports leagues and such all flipped their wigs and threatened to basically boycott the state until it caved in and the bill was gutted. You'd think they passed a bill to legalize slavery.
Nowdays, not so much. There isn't as much media hoopla, companies are way less eager to wade in, and bills have passed in a number of states. That's not the way this was "supposed" to go. If anything, the last couple of controversies have actually put the boycott shoe on the other foot.
I mean thanks to Hogwarts Legacy it's now been conclusively shown that progressives flipping out on social media over "transphobia" can be safely ignored while promoting your mass-market media product. Sure enough, Rowling sits on Twitter shitposting at trans activists all day like it's 4chan and that hasn't stopped the head of Warner Bros from publicly touting her involvement in the new HP show as a positive.
Compare that with the shitstomping Bud Light took for letting a mere hint of transgender activist marketing waft in the general direction of their product. Behind the scenes people have clearly had serious conversations reassessing what they do and do not need to care about in regard to public opinion. The amount of shits given about progs mad at transphobia has visibly plummeted.
Besides, statistically it's not like the people saying "trans women are women" would actually date one. The number of straight people willing to even countenance such a thing is essentially just a lizardman's constant, and even among the rest of the LGB community the proportion is shockingly low. This is a social/political signalling meme, not something people are living when the lights go out. Memes like that can have great power to be sure, but eventually they run their course.
I do have to laugh about that. It may not be edifying, but she didn't buckle to the pressure to self-flagellate in public as a wicked sinner and change all her views. She leaned into "okay, if I'm Lady Hitler, let me do that!" I think that's why the aggravated are throwing "she's anti-Semitic, the goblin bankers* are Jewish caricatures! she's pro-slavery, look at how the books mock Hermione trying to free the house elves!" accusations at her. Anything at all to pull her down and let them be the victors. And it's not working, and it's driving them nuts.
*They're not caricaturing anything but the gnomes of Zurich, and if you want to tell me that Swiss bankers are famously Jewish, uh I don't think so.
I think that argument has been quietly dropped since Oct 7. Its very difficult to argue that *she's * dog-whistling by setting the goblin uprising during a year when something bad happened to a Jewish community elsewhere in Europe, but that chanting a slogan used by an openly genocidal group isn't an anti-semitic dogwhistle.
It will, of course, still be vaguely remembered on the internet that of course she's been proven to be anti-semitic and that the details don't matter, but that's just the way things always work. (And, as an aside, that sort of thing really pisses me off in a general way - that the accusations are bunk, but get forgotten and stick regardless)
I've still seen it in the wild.
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"Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs."
The house-elves could have been an interesting discussion; what obligation do we have to beings that are as sapient as humans, but aren't human, and have very different preferences to humans?
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And yet Hogwarts Legacy still has a highly conspicuous trans character (who must have been directly approved by Rowling given she maintains absolute creative control over her setting), and it’s likely the new show will too.
There were multiple backlashes to the growing gay rights movement between 1967 and 2015, but in each case the long term trajectory was clear.
Sure they're still hedging their bets, but in the process they're learning that A) it doesn't actually take the heat off them and B) nobody really cares anyway. Zaslav going out of his way to make sure the public knows Rowling is directly involved in the new show, even as the headlines about her dunking on the trans community flow, is a significant signal.
Everything isn't the gay rights battle. Social media is a lot more ubiquitous now than it was ten or fifteen years ago, and frankly the trans community uses it to be their own worst enemy in ways that are uniquely their own.
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The question of how inevitable is the inevitable march of progress is a pretty fascinating one to me. I don't really have an answer here, and you may very well be right that over the long term the trans movement will keep winning, but it's not like there has never been a Science backed Progressive idea that has turned out to be a short-lived fad, and an embarrassment, forcing progressive elites to run damage control, and lay thick layers of dust on historical documents, lest someone finds and reads them. Or maybe they'll just redefine victory. A world where transgender people aren't cast out of mainstream society as weirdos, but their demands to be treated as literal women in every aspect of society go unanswered, and everyone pretends pediatric gender care was a Big Pharma conspiracy to exploit children for profit, looks like a win for the trans community to me, if you look at it from the perspective of 20 years ago, but a massive loss from nowadays.
That particular capability relied on monopolistic control of the media and a general consensus that the media they controlled were trustworthy. Both are now absent, and history is coming for them.
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Are you sure about that? I'm not sure what you mean by "indistinguishable" here, just going by hormone levels, or a full examination. But even going only by hormones, without looking it up, I'd be willing to bet on the opposite. My understanding is that barring an orchiectomy / hysterectomy you're not going to get the T/E levels down to the opposite sex average, and if you do, you'd make them absolutely miserable. Maybe an early puberty blockade might work, but that alone would be a giveaway re: distinguishability.
What do you mean by "this debate", just adult transition, pediatric gender affirming care, or the whole shebang? What are you basing this opinion on? From what I understand anyone that actually looks at the evidence is forced to conclude gender affirming care has flimsy backing
So far it seems that the more embedded it gets, the more it drags down movements that already gained acceptance.
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Do you think concerns for the welfare of detrans people are unfounded?
Edit: actually, the above isn't a good response. Here's what I should have written:
The topic of "trans issues" contains many questions. The question of whether or not hormones are good at replicating secondary sex characteristics is just one of those questions. Is it one of the more important questions of the topic? I wouldn't have thought so. I don't really think the more intellectual people of any stance would consider it to be, either. Would you feel vastly different about trans people if they weren't? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TGux5Fhcd7GmTfNGC/is-that-your-true-rejection
So I ask you, what does it mean to say "the debate is well settled"? There is not one debate, it's a vast number of smaller questions. I don't think it's intellectually rigorous to pretend like it's all one big question. Even if you think that every one of those unlisted questions has been settled in favor of trans people, even the ones where it's not obvious which answer would necessarily be the one that favors trans people the most, I think it's sleight of hand to act like it's all one big question which has been answered. And then I can't help but feel that it's also sleight of hand to reference one small and not necessarily consequential aspect of the debate before saying that the larger debate has been settled, as if one small question decides answers all the other questions too.
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