The trans panic

[seebs]

I figure people probably know, but I just want to be super clear on this:

Even if all the panic stories were roughly accurate, they would not come close to justifying the sheer insane volume of anti-trans bullshit coming out of the Tories and the Republicans.

BUT.

They are not true. They aren't even sort of true. There is no "rapid-onset gender dysphoria". There is no "oh people are just becoming trans because of social pressure". There is no problem with sports teams being overrun with trans kids. There is no problem of trans women just being men who want access to women's bathrooms so they can rape people. There are no men claiming to be women to get access to women's prisons. None of this stuff is happening. Not just "not on a large scale", but like, we genuinely don't have evidence that it's happening at all. It's purely fictitious.

Gender is fucking weird, humans are weird, and life is complicated, and it is actually fine to just let people deal with it on their own terms, use the pronouns people give you, and not freak out about it. It does not actually matter who goes in which bathroom in most cases, and cis guys have been using women's bathrooms for my entire life and it has never been an actual problem. (This is because women's bathrooms were, for decades, the only ones that had baby-changing stations.)

Gender-affirming care is not particularly experimental; almost everyone you know has had medical procedures which are newer and less tested. Regret rates aren't zero, but they're around 1-2%, which is the lowest regret rate of basically any treatment for anything. A lot of things like knee replacements have regret rates around 10-20% and no one thinks it's a horrible problem, because hey, that's still 80-90% of people being a lot happier. Also, gender-affirming care isn't particularly exclusive to trans people; cis guys getting treated for gynecomastia are in fact getting gender-affirming care. No one thinks there's anything weird about that.

Like, just... The whole thing is totally fake. There's not a real argument buried in here which deserves consideration and respect. There's not a real problem we need to solve, and if there were, these laws would not be the way to solve it.

[Ensign Steve]

Hear hear.

[JoeP]

I'll bring sausage rolls.

Oh, I thought you said trans picnic.

Still works.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by seebs

and cis guys have been using women's bathrooms for my entire life and it has never been an actual problem. (This is because women's bathrooms were, for decades, the only ones that had baby-changing stations.)

But seebs, what's to stop men having babies just so they can go into women's bathrooms? You're not addressing this problem at all which means you're actively promoting it!



Slightly more seriously, you say these things haven't measurably happened ... but I bet there are recorded cases ... of Republican congressmen specifically.

Every accusation is a confession, specifically of what they would do given the chance.

[seebs]

I spent a lot of the last few years immersed in arguments about the nature of gender, etc, and discovered that I'm noticably happier if I just say "whatever's fine" on pronouns and get a mix of them depending on how people read me at the moment.