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[Loud Whispers]

Well, apart from one particular statement, I'm surprised to find broad agreement with LW on this issue...

it was just a bit of banter, nothing to lose your head over

[Grim Portent]

Truss wants to give the UK government the ability to ignore Human Rights rulings.

Clearly a wonderful idea, what does it matter if government policy needs to be a human rights violation?

[Starver]

For a while now, I have suspected the humans have been a minority in the various Cabinets, so it seems perfectly logical that this does not matter much to them.

[anewaname]

Well, the UK is a part of the ECHR but most or none of the Commonwealth members are not.

Given that "Rwanda" and "human rights violation" are often part of the same news blurb, and that Rwanda joined the Commonwealth as a country that had not been a part of the "UK colonial empire", it seems that this could be seem as a reforming of the "UK colonial empire", but instead of British troops suppressing the locals, the government of the member state would do it. This is where you could see the UK military complex selling population-suppression tools to Commonwealth governments so they can control their own population through authoritarian means.

If the UK is ejecting Rwandan immigrants that the UK's courts say are illegal and that Rwanda would accept back ("yes, we would accept this traitor criminal back, we need to cause them pain"), would the ECHR have jurisdiction over UK in the matter? Because this gets into, "what laws did the UK subject itself to when they signed onto the ECHR?" and "Is the UK going to be able to shift the human rights blame onto the other country which the UK just happens to be working with?"

EDIT: This has similar qualities to the stance between the USA and the ICC, where the appearance is that the USA won't join the ICC because they would be judged in court for things they've done.

[Doomblade187]

Well, apart from one particular statement, I'm surprised to find broad agreement with LW on this issue...

it was just a bit of banter, nothing to lose your head over

It's always just a bit of banter until it isn't.

[Loud Whispers]

It's always just a bit of banter until it isn't.

if your bants wreck the concept of Christmas itself you deserve to be the archbishop of banterbury

[Great Order]

REEE LABOUR SHOULD ALLOW TRANSPHOBES TO SPEW TRANSPHOBIA OTHERWISE THEY'RE BIGOTS!

Brought to you by a transphobic newspaper, and the same woman who tried to tie the Roe Vs Wade shit to trans groups.

[nenjin]

It seemed more balanced than that to me.

What should be a calm conversation about how to balance a conflict of rights has been turned into a culture war

Your reaction seems to support their position that the conversation becomes immediately toxic regardless of what anyone actually says or whatever nuance there is. Now, I didn't go out and research this lady before I reacted, I'm just reacting to the article. Maybe she got caught on hot mic, or maintains a manifesto somewhere. I'm only considering what they wrote and how it was written.

How DO you propose to talk about women who don't want to be housed with transgender sex offenders, or how to structure laws that balance a child's safety and well being against their or their parent's desire to issue them hormone blockers during puberty? As a contrasting example on parental rights vs. state interests, vegans who only feed their child a specific set of vegetables to the point the child needs to be hospitalized for severe nutrition deficiency and whose mental and physical development may have been stifled and thrown off for the rest of their lives.

You have to balance parental rights with the child's rights, even if children don't know to exercise them. That's why the government has an interest in it. To balance things effectively and justly, you have to build legislation and look at existing laws. To do that, you have to be able to have a conversation at all. If the only people you're willing to include in the conversation are the ones who will always 100% agree with you, then it's a self-serving, dishonest conversation. There are lines to this as well, but that means you have to be willing to consider nuance.

When you make no distinction between the right and their brand of transphobia and everyone else, there cannot be conversation at all, because there is no nuance between viewpoints. Which is the exact same trap the Right fell into a long time ago.

Stuff like this is why anyone with a nuanced opinion on the transgender/identity debates just walks away without getting involved. You ask questions even, you get called transphobic. Trans folk want trans rights yesterday, so they largely are opposed to restrictions, delays or the nuance of reframing how we think about identity and gender in a legal sense. That's why there's push back and other people saying "We need to have a real talk about this, and just about everyone has a vested interest in the outcome." Calling that position transphobic is, to me, just as absurd as what the right throws out to shut down conversation.

And just so I make my position abundantly clear.....most of our laws around people's behavior is on the honor system. There are consequences if you do otherwise. I think that's an acceptable standard to apply to transpeople. If people are worried about what a transgender person is going to do in a bathroom, prison, etc....whatever they were going to do is already handled by our existing laws. Anything much more than that is discrimination.

Sports I think is a much tougher subject and one I'm not even going to try and get into now.

[Great Order]

I dunno, call me extreme but I'm not particularly fond of "gender-critical" people who are, in fact, operating on the basis that I'm not transgender but rather psychotic at best, a misogynistic women's space invading sex offender at worst.

I'm fine with a debate about biologically-female (Which I'm using to differentiate between gender and sex, rather than "Men and females" type stuff) only spaces, sports, and so on. That's something that needs sorting, even if it's just to present facts. The issue is I'm not fine with having it with the type of people who categorically deny my existence.

A bit like asking refugees to have an open debate on refugee rights with the English Defence League.

EDIT: Or, to put it simply, the issue isn't the "What" but the "Who"

[Loud Whispers]

Your reaction seems to support their position that the conversation becomes immediately toxic regardless of what anyone actually says or whatever nuance there is. Now, I didn't go out and research this lady before I reacted, I'm just reacting to the article. Maybe she got caught on hot mic, or maintains a manifesto somewhere. I'm only considering what they wrote and how it was written.

Toxicity by design to be selectively utilised when convenient like a war banner so supporters of socialism get cor-binned but supporters of corporatism get elevated into leadership

[Doomblade187]

*Really* not the thread for it, but RE: transgender athletes. There is no major evidence that trans athletes have an advantage over cisgender athletes in the same gender.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5357259/
https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/08/31/do-transgender-athletes-have-a-competitive-advantage/

What trans exclusionary measures *do* result in is cisgender people being banned from the sport they love.
https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/31749541/namibia-female-runners-banned-olympic-400-meters-high-testosterone-levels

(World Athletics' testosterone rules only apply to events between 400 meters and one mile., so she ended up running the 200m.)

The times spurred World Athletics to conduct "medical assessments" on the two at their current training camp in Italy, the Namibian Olympic committee said. The results indicated that both have high natural testosterone levels, the committee said.

"It is important to understand that both our athletes were not aware of this condition," it said.

The situation is reminiscent of the controversial sex verification tests conducted on a teenage Semenya at the 2009 world championships.

World Athletics' latest testosterone regulations have been fiercely debated since they were introduced in 2018.

I find that typically when someone has questions regarding the impact of trans rights on women (and it is never the impact of trans rights on men) it's very easy to tell whether they're actually open to listening or not.

[Starver]

It's a hot topic in Scotland right now. Protests against trans-friendly laws[1], being rather vocal with particularly absolutist arguments that I would not say are totally 'wrong', but certainly are deaf to the issues trying to be addressed.

[1] Famously including a certain over-rated author.

[Great Order]

Interestingly (and depressingly) trans acceptance has fallen in the UK compared to a few years back. Presumably because we've become the current hot topic culture war issue, and the media's been more than happy to stoke that flame.

[Starver]

I don't actually know, in person, many anti-trans people who have had problems with being 'de-accepted'[1] ((<=edit: "de-accepting" makes more sense here, if anythin... I think I munged sentences about both sides together. But neither anti-transers going notably more anti- nor transers suffering more anti- backlash must have been my intended gists, respectively. Does this help? No, probably not.)) Though I've known people who are 'anti-' in various illiberal ways that likely makes them perrenial objectors to the vague idea of trans-ness amongst all the other kinds of 'not my kind of person' bigotry (possibly, in some cases, actually self-hate from peer pressures). Perhaps I'm just not that observant, though, to the subtlety of drifting opinions.

I do find it ironic that there are vocal members of minorities(/traditionally oppressed) who have strong opinions against even smaller slices of minorities (often with similar problems of acceptance by the 'majority' to themself) beyond what I'd see as rational. Whether that's the first two of the original LGB who dislike the third, or 'white' LGBTs who are outright racist to non-white LFBTs, or the uncompromisingly trans-exclusionary subset of women.


I think it's more the 24-hour-news and/or echo-chamber effect that it is more obvious or (seemingly) promoted, though. Possibly it's just more 'acceptable' to admit (even on an anonymous survey) that you have such a low-volume[2] personal discrimination, and an opinion you probably didn't even learn to have (or was just indistinguishable from background homophobia) in days gone by, but now you've got evangelistic fearmongering highlighting the rare cases when trans(-identifying) individuals are of the predatative variety rather than being physically and emotionally more vulnerable even than the typical woman might be.


Disclaimer: This is my gut feeling, possibly as uninformed as anyone else not actually in the shoes[3] of any of those involved. With no reference to any such cross-era survey results, at all. In the first part, I'm not trying to 'cis-splain' anybody's own experience (nor more tradaitionally man-splain), and I'm just giving my impression from my own singular and statistically insignificant viewpoint. I'll have to accept full ownership of any hole I've just dug myself into, therefore.




[1] Not openly, anyway. Of the handful of actual trans individuals I can speak of (and, obviously, for one reason or another have known to be so), I haven't been there to see hostility at first-hand. What problems they encountered in everyday life I can only imagine. And one of those individuals was for some time a member of a sports club I'm in but may have left due to adverse comments by some other member that were never made in my presence.

[2] With a top-end estimate being that it involves slightly less than 0.5% of the population. I mean, it's practically a victimless bigotry, at a level below that of run-of-the-mill antisemitism and maybe slightly above a distrust of 'gypsies', amirite?

[3] It would be crass to substitute "shoes" with some terminalogically feminine version of the attire, but it did of course momentarily occur to me. Before I decided not to. Before then deciding to explain here that I decided not to, as full disclosure. Why I additionally decided to explain all further meta-explanations, I'm afraid I cannot explain.

[Great Order]

Hm, you know, is there an LGBT thread somewhere? There ought to be considering it's a fairly big topic (Although for different reasons now compared to the 00s when it was about the LGB side of things)