ALL: How can 'trans' be a protected category if there is no standard definition of trans? (Bonus question: what is trans?)
Submitted June 26, 2020, 7:10 p.m. by calming-teaSee title.
87 comments recovered from the Pushshift database.
See title.
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ah... in our shattered world things don't actually have to be logically coherent in order to be put into law, unfortunately. at least within certain subsets of the queer community, this breakdown of language and meaning is intentional.
i don't consider 'trans' or 'queer' to be meaningful words, because everyone who identifies as either has a completely different conception as to what they mean, which renders them meaningless to me.
Dude, obsess about something else. Why do you have such a hard-on for trans people? Go have some calming tea and chill the fuck out.
Ah yes, saying 'fuck off' bigots to trans people you disagree with shows who is the morally superior person. Your post history is indicative of a happy and stable human being! Cheers (and reported)
exactly, if you aren’t trans then there’s no reason to be obsessing over this shit EVERY SINGLE DAY
what does it mean to be 'trans' to you?
I think if there weren't such a large push to reorganize society by gender identity then no one would care.
What a trash comment.
Obviously trans related issues are having an effect on non trans people. That’s why we’re here. We weren’t here discussing any of this before things got to where they are. Go have some get the fuck over yourself tea and get your head out of your ass
I feel like we can protect trans people by protecting gender non-conformity (like what the Supreme Court did).
Agreed, especially children
I agree. And that's usually the only case you'll be able to prove discrimination anyway - when an employer has different standards for how someone needs to dress/act/talk based on their sex.
I used to think it was as simple as “trans” is not what got you to transition- it’s the actual being physically transitioned or in the process of it. So it doesn’t matter that it’s full of contradictions and they don’t agree with each other- being physically trans- regardless of why- is what’s protected.
But I could be way wrong lol
As for the bonus- imo, trans is physically transitioning. Period. I’m sure the different motivations and classifications and diagnoses matter amongst trans people, but to the rest of us (or at least me) it’s still about sex, so the motivations, classifications, and diagnoses are secondary when it comes to rights and spaces and sports (and sex and dating)
Me too. Anything else is just someone’s individual ideology that others might see it differently and we can’t really determine it scientifically.
How do we support people who can't transition?
If they can’t transition, how are they trans?
(Genuine question, I don’t get this)
I’m by no means an expert, but people transition for a reason, right? Namely dysphoria and the like. I would consider anyone with dysphoria or other symptoms of being trans trans, even if they are unable to transition. IMO saying otherwise is comparable to the notion that you aren’t gay if you don’t have a partner. I may be biased as a trans person, but that’s my two cents.
it’s not a bad analogy.
i would agree that a trans person who has no plan to physically or socially transition would be analogous to a gay man who is single. there are certain rights he still needs to protect him—employment discrimination—however, he would not personally need the right to gay marriage. that doesn’t make him any less gay.
in that vein, trans people can still be trans and not need to utilize certain rights until after they have fully transitioned. why would a male-bodied, male-appearing transwoman need to use the woman’s bathroom when they will be fine in the men’s bathroom? it is not wrong to legally draw a line between pre- and post- transitioned people. equality is not the same as fairness because people have different needs.
I would consider anyone with dysphoria someone with dysphoria, Id consider anyone who transitions trans.
What about people with dysphoria who do not want to transition?
Many people can't transition- perhaps they can't afford it, or it's not available where they live.
How do they face transphobia if they are not transitioning? How do you define transphobia?
Who said anything about transphobia?
Why do they need support if they don't face transphobia ?
The UK equality act defines it as someone who is transitioning and it's based on stereotypes - no need for surgery or hormones, its using a new name, dressing a particular way. You can't discriminate against someone for coming out as trans.
Everyone is protected by their sex, so its illegal to discriminate based on how people define and present themselves - this is where lobby groups are misrepresenting it. For example, it would be illegal to deny a transman a morning after pill. Women can get them in a pharmacy with a quick consultation but men can't. This same logic applies everywhere so a transwoman can't be denied access to a male changing room at the swimming pool.
Question (also based in UK): do you have to have legally transitioned (i.e. have a gender recognition certificate) as a MtF on order to have the right to get the pill prescribed to you?
If you have a GNC as a FtM does that mean you can't get the pill prescribed?
Both of those scenarios sound bizarre to me, because whether or not you have a GNC, the pill should not be prescribed to the MfF and it should be available to the FtM.
If it's not reliant on a GNC then what you're legally entitled to is based on a feeling in your head that you can't prove.
So any of these scenarios is totally ridiculous.
That's what the sex exemption and the gender reassignment exemptions are for. Assuming the ftm hasn't had the surgery, the pill could be prescribed to prevent pregnancy but also heavy periods or to stop them so the gp couldn't refuse to prescribe based on the patient identifying as male because that's a person with female sex being treated less favourably due to gender reasignment.
The mtf can't be prescribed the pill to prevent pregnancy because its not needed. It's not discrimination because of what the drugs are used for.
Ah I see, thanks for explaining. :)
(Not QT or GC, Not trans)
IMO, this is the biggest issue at hand. Trans people obviously exist and get discriminated against, but it’s important to realize that (1) It’s a different axis of oppression than sexism or homophobia (though there is some overlap, considering that bigots are pretty ignorant), and (2) for transgender to be a protected class, it needs to have a clear definition.
The problem with (1) seems to be the heart of the GC/QT clash. GC either don’t view trans people as an oppressed class, or they believe that in situations where the two classes’ rights are in conflict that biological women must always take precedent over trans women, and biological women being identified as women must take precedent over trans men (despite nominally including trans men in their feminism). Trans and allies on the other hand see both sexism and transphobia but they conflate the two and act as if biological women and trans women’s issues are one and the same, which doesn’t allow enough nuance.
The problem with (2) is that from my observation, the concept of “gatekeeping” is anathema to most of the trans community (except so called transmeds/ “truscum” — this negative connotation term shows how the community feels about them). This reluctance to exclude anyone from the trans umbrella is understandable, because if you’ve been viewed as a weirdo or freak for much of your life, you don’t want to be exclusionary towards other people. However, the problem with zero gatekeeping is that there is effectively no community at that point. I understand the trans/allies arguments in favor of ending gatekeeping (“what if doctors are transphobic and won’t diagnose dysphoria”, “what about trans people who can’t afford hormones or surgeries”, etc) but they need to recognize that a group with zero gatekeeping is equivalent to the set of all humans and thus there is nothing to protect. This is why imo some level of gatekeeping must happen. How? I’m not so sure. I would trust medical professionals and members of the community to be able to agree on some reasonable guidelines. All I know is that a definition must exist if trans is going to be a protected class under the law.
I’m a big fan of different rules for different situations. Co worker wants a certain pronoun? No problem. A guy suddenly declares he’s trans now that he’s been convicted because he wants to go to a women’s prison? Sure you can get a psyche eval and get started your hormones in the men’s prison and then we can talk.
I think there’s objective biological differences vs social ones. There’s a difference between Gc thinking that a trans women is going come and rape them in the bathroom vs pre-med trans women running in track at a competition.
100% agree with all that.
It can't be a legally protected category if you can't define it, and I haven't seen any definition of what being trans means. As someone in this thread put it better than me: if you are so committed to not gatekeeping that anyone can be trans, then noone is trans.
Also, TRA are in a contradictory position, because:
1. They don't want to be committed to physical, medical transition (e.g. majority of MtF want to keep their genitals) but
2. If they don't medically transition, 'social' transition can only consistent of demanding pronouns and dressing in a gender non-conforming way, I.e. adhering to sexist stereotypes of your target gender.
If you do neither the medical nor the social transition and still say you're trans, then transness is a feeling in your head that you can't prove.
But I do think people should be protected of discrimination based on not confirming to gender norms, though I don't know anything about the law so I don't know how you would do this.
SCOTUS ruled that it would be considered sex-based discrimination. for example, if a natal woman wears a dress, it is fine. if a natal man wears a dress, he is treated poorly. thus, there is a difference between how you are treating the sexes, so it is sex-based discrimination. this also applies to sexuality—if you are okay with a woman dating a man, but you are not okay with a man dating a man, you are considered to be discriminating based on sex.
Ok, this makes sense. Seems like the law in the US protects you from dressing in a non-conforming way, which is great. I think society needs to also do some work in supporting people who don't conform to gendered dress standards.
As it's generally used these days, 'trans' is an ideological (or religious) interpretation of a set of facts, not the set of facts themselves.
To elaborate
Consider the following situations:
A person really wants to be the opposite sex.
A person feels that they fit better into the social role and expectations imposed upon then opposite sex.
A person gets sexually aroused by imagining themselves to be the opposite sex.
A person has altered their body through chemicals and surgery in order to more closely resemble the opposite sex.
A person can successfully pass for a member of the opposite sex to most people in public.
The above are all factual, objective situations.
Then onto this is placed the ideological framework of 'trans', which says that, for some or all of the situations above, this means that the person really is, in a meaningful way, the opposite sex. Or, alternatively, it postulates that there exists some other core characteristic of humans, more important and fundamental to society than sex, called 'gender' or 'gender identity', for which humans have historically (in a prejudiced and ignorant way) used sex as a rough approximation, and then postulates that some or all of the above situations demonstrates that the person has a 'gender' or 'gender identity' that we tend to associate with the other sex, and that, as noted, this classification is the one that really matters, not sex.
Why would "trans" be a protected category in the first place? "Women" isn't a protected category, instead, sex is a protected characteristic. "Hispanic" isn't a protected category, race is. The protected characteristic would be gender identity or expression, not "being trans".
That doesn't really help, because these are also undefined.
In what way? I can't really imagine a court for example would have any difficulty deciding whether or not something counts as being part of gender identity or expression.
'Undefined' in the sense of not having a coherent, consensus definition. And that would certainly give a court trouble.
There's a massive amount of debate "within" discussions about gender identity and expression, but there isn't exactly a lot of debate as to what those discussions are relevant to. It's kinda like morality. People might disagree on whether "murder is wrong" is correct, or how it should be interpreted, or whatever wider conversation you might have, but most people will agree that it's a statement relevant to morality. Could you give me an example of something you think a court might struggle to decide whether it counts as being part of gender identity or expression?
Literally anything could or could not be considered 'part of gender identity or expression' based upon the lack of a coherent definition. Just the other day we were discussing an 'explanation' which characterized different ways of eating your breakfast as different 'gender expressions'.
Wait, what? Are you serious? I can't imagine a court would ever be able to consistently and difnitively decide whether something counts as gender identity or expression.
What do you mean by them?
I I mean, I don't identify well with men as men, and certainly feel like I am not a real man most of my waking life, but my feeling of not identifying with other men, can't possibly mean that I'm not actually one...
But Ive actually had people on the qt side try to argue with me that I'm really a transwoman and my refusal to transition is just internalized transphobia.
I guess this is a good reason for why only people who physically transition should be considered trans. Discrimination against non-transitioned people can be captured under gender nonconformity, homophobia, or sexism.
That sounds reasonable enough to me. It's aggravating that a woman with PCOs is "more trans" than your standard tumblrgendr proxvir demiboy. How is one "trans" when they literally haven't gone in any direction?
The medical community has a standard definition for trans. It doesnt matter if GC disagrees with the definitions of "cis" and "trans" because law makers dont take the opinions of hostile bigots into account when writing protections for minorities
So what is the medical definition for trans? Seems that very few trans posters on this sub can agree about what 'trans' actually means, so let's hear from the docs.
A lot of law makers are hostile bigots; the only people who don't understand and acknowledge this are the highly privileged. White men, I'm looking at you.
Cry me a river. Amazing how law-makers are these saintly beings when they're making decisions in your favor. I'm sure you'd see them as 'hateful bigots' if they decided that trans people are already protected under the law because there are laws in place to protect people on the basis of sex and sexual orientation. But you go ahead and venerate the white dudes who put laws in place to favor white dudes. What a huge victory >eyeroll<.
In the meantime, women's access to reproductive system health services continues to erode. but now men-who-identify-as-women can't get fired for being trans.
No, because medical community talks abot people who either have dysphoria (i am not super up to date, but DSM is 'gender dysphoria' and ICD should be 'gender identity disorder'). Neither of those say anything about "trans", afaik maybe the ICD talks about "transsexuals"..which is now transphobic so there
The scientific community is not going to use a word that changes meaning every week or so.
For cis, you don't have a word for people who do not have clinical depression, because it is pretty pointless to identify them beyond 'healthy'
Finally, stop thinking that people in the scientific community are one single brain that knows everything and has no political bias. You are going to find scientists that agree with trans and those that don't and those that are scepitcal. If you spent even a second googling it, you would find that there has been a huge discussion regarding the new ICD for how to approach "trans" and various opinions of medicalization of the issue
If there had been one single established definition, it would be a google search, not a debate post
The name in the ICD-11 is "gender incongruence".
If you want to purge “hostile bigots”, you may want to purge your own team, hypocrite.