Sigh...
With lefties, it's never enough to just leave people the hell alone. They gotta get in your face and make you not merely tolerate but actively accept and embrace their ways. Toleration really ought to be enough, folks, but for millions of leftie idiots, that just isn't the case. I can tolerate the presence of decent Muslims in my community just fine, but this doesn't mean I have to embrace their belief system. As much as the left hates to hear this, toleration doesn't imply acceptance or even agreement. According to leftists, my toleration of Muslims, coupled with my rejection of the Muslim worldview, somehow makes me Islamophobic.
With all the ado about trans swimmer Lia Thomas (who has had hormone therapy but no gender-reassignment surgery) and the controversy surrounding Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, who can't or won't define what a woman is, the trans issue raises its ugly head again. Let me recap my original stance on the issue:
- I believe you can do what you want with your own body.
- I do not think you're mentally ill if you experience body dysphoria. I actually have a great deal of sympathy for people who feel trapped in the wrong body.
- There are nevertheless morally relevant issues that come with being trans. I previously gave the example of a trans woman fighting MMA in the octagon: a chromosomally male person is beating the crap out of a biological female. If this were an alley scenario—a man beating up a woman—people would be screaming for the man's head. But in the octagon, it's somehow okay?
So overall, I'm fairly libertarian about trans folks. I can even say that I wouldn't mind using a pronoun like "she" or a term of address like "Ma'am" because I can at least see how it's possible for such terms to apply to gender, not sex. I already use "she" in reference to someone like RuPaul, who is merely a drag queen (the term "trans" might apply even to him; the word's borders are fuzzy).* Like Jordan Peterson, however, I don't want some controlling authority to mandate my speech because, at that point, it's no longer free speech.
I'm trying to walk a fine line, here. If we apply my MMA-octagon example to Lia Thomas, then I'd have to say that it's unfair for Thomas to compete with regular women (or as the PC crowd would call them, "cis-women"). I hear Thomas recently finished a race against female competitors dead last, and I have to wonder whether she threw the race on purpose because of all this controversy. Thomas, as a male, was a mediocre competitor at best, but as a trans woman, she's cleaning up. For Thomas suddenly to lose so badly makes me suspicious.
A lot of this comes down to something I've covered before: sex versus gender. Sex is inviolable and unalterable because it's chromosomal. If you have a Y chromosome, you're male, like it or not. No amount of surgery or hormone therapy can change that. If you have no Y chromosome, you're female. Period. Gender, I think, is another matter, especially if we think of it as a social construction involving how we define our roles in a culture. There are apparently cultures with certain rituals in which one member of the culture will adopt a gender-ambiguous role sometimes referred to as a "third gender." Wikipedia's article on third gender cites the Mahu gender-intermediate state in the Hawaiian and Tahitian cultures, among other cultures.
If we think of gender in terms of socially constructed roles, then concepts like gender fluidity start to make sense, and I'm fine with fluid genders. As I've said before, I grew up on a diet of science fiction, much of which prepared me mentally for a sexually polymorphic world. So I'm open to such things, but I'm not open to Lia Thomas competing with regular women, or with language police who think they can tell me how to talk, what pronouns to use.
And this brings us back to the "can't leave well enough alone" problem alluded to at the beginning of this post: leftists want us to accept Lia Thomas as a woman—full stop—with no further qualifications. Personally, I'm fine thinking of Lia Thomas as a trans woman, and I think she ought to be competing in a trans league just for people like her. Governor DeSantis was right, I think, to declare Emma Weyant the winner of the 500-yard freestyle event at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championship in Florida, even though Weyant finished second after Thomas, because Thomas is not a woman in the fully biological sense. A biological male really has no right or reason to be lumped in with biological females. But leftists are up in arms because they want to steamroller sex and gender into the same thing, and we, the people, have to swallow that nonsense. Create a trans league, a third category, for all sports in which sex makes a difference (not fishing, assuming you think of fishing as a sport), and let's see where we go from there.
While I'm at it: don't tell me I'm "transphobic" if I refuse to date or to have sex with a biological male who's on hormones and has undergone reassignment surgery. I have preferences, and I don't see these preferences as on a moral level at all: it's like wanting onions or no onions on pizza. Am I to burn in hell because I hate having onions on my pizza? I should think not. By the same token, if I'm grossed out at the thought of dating a trans woman, that's just an amoral, reflexive thing, not at all equivalent to a moral stance. I don't give a shit what a trans woman does as long as it doesn't involve sexually coupling with me. If I'm a bigot for thinking that way, then you're a bigot for liking onions on your pizza.
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*RuPaul is apparently indifferent to which pronoun is used. Wikipedia's article on RuPaul refers to the drag queen as "he."
Your stance is pretty much spot on with my feelings on the gender wars. I've been impressed with how accepting Filipinos are of people who identify as other than their chromosomal sex. In most ways, this is a conservative Catholic society, but in this regard, it is live and let live. A biological male who identifies as female is known as a bakla, and women who live as males are called tomboys. Neither term is used in a derogatory way. Maybe because of this tolerance baklas and tomboys are out and proud and I see them frequently around town going about their lives like everyone else. Billy, who runs the dart tourneys, is a tomboy and no one gives it a second thought--why should we? Now, I still see her as a woman living as a man so maybe there is some unconscious bigotry on my part. I notice others calling Billy "kuya" (brother) and using other male pronouns. I've not managed to do that on a consistent basis. Billy takes no offense and we are actually quite friendly even outside of our darting connection. I guess in a sense, tolerance is a two-way street--we don't judge each other, we just accept things as they are.
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