[RD] JK Rowling and Explicit Transphobia

[TheMeInTeam]

I think you might find that animal abuse and people who enable and apologize for animal abusers might be a more personal issue if you were an animal.

Non-sequitur to the point being made in the discussion above.

 

[cardgame]

new law proposes to make being black and out-of-doors past sundown illegal

a completely normal person, talking to a crowd of angry black people: "jesus, relax, it's not personal"

 

[Seon]

How is it not? It’s not non-sequitor to point out that unlike animal abuse, transpeople themselves might be personally offended by transphobic people as well as people who think we should treat transphobes with any degree of respect regarding their opinions on transpeople.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

How is it not? It’s not non-sequitor to point out that unlike animal abuse, transpeople themselves might be personally offended by transphobic people as well as people who think we should treat transphobes with any degree of respect regarding their opinions on transpeople.

This will just be dismissed.

Why bother?

 

[NinjaCow64]

I don't know if you're too young, but during the gay marriage debate pushback was "we already have the same freedoms! I am allowed to marry people of the opposite gender and so are gay people!". It was BS, and we have to look at the legal solutions that worked. Every region that said "gay people are allowed to marry people of their gender" created unsustainable Common Law privileges. Most sensible regions just created a more sweeping right "you're allowed to marry anyone, regardless of gender". Not a privilege, but a right.

Okay that's a good point. I can see how my snide point might not translate into reality that well. But either way at the end of the day I believe that trans people should have the right to legally change their gender and people who are opposed to that are not going to be convinced by linguistic arguments.

The way to get properly funded treatments that created rights, but not privileges, is to create universal healthcare akin to the UK's framing. In healthcare, we use something called DALYs, which essentially measure the efficacy of a treatment based on how much it improves the quality of life of the recipient. It's not just adding pure lifespan, because everyone know that extended years of suffering aren't the same as extended years of health. The UK buys DALYs for its people based on an efficiency ratio, which (having in worked in the field) I rather like on a theoretical level but with the caveat that it was the first economic theory on delivering sustainable healthcare I was truly immersed in, so I'm hella biased.

So, if you frame it as a right to healthcare based on need, then it universally works A cishet person never will need that specific therapy (unless it's to access some insane privilege in a progressive location that doesn't write sustainable laws wisely), but it doesn't matter, because the creation of that net catches them in whatever way back luck gets them.

I was trying to avoid the healthcare discussion for a few reasons. I'm less familiar with the medical science surrounding trans issues than I am about the legal issues and I am likely far to the Left of many posters (for instance I think that the state should fully cover everyone's healthcare costs, but that's not a discussion for this thread). And unfortunately this argument doesn't work with people who don't believe in a right to healthcare or somehow think that HRT should be "optional".

The science of medical intervention to assist transpeople is still in its total infancy. We have a variety of opinions on what may help and what people feel helps, but we have no long-term data. Assigning the DALY model means that we get ratcheting improvements overtime. Any intervention we fund runs the risk of being suboptimal, so if we fund specific interventions instead of the model we create a bad system where bad treatments get locked in. The American health R&D system is pretty terrible, and full of perverse incentives, and you don't want to stack more bad policy onto old bad policy.

I'll admit I am not trans nor am I a doctor or medical scientist. However, I am wary of the idea that we should tie funding to long term research. The evidence that I've seen overwhelmingly points to HRT being very good for transpeople, significantly lowering suicide ideation among transpeople. And anecdotal evidence that I have seen is overwhelmingly positive also. While there are improvements to be made in the field of transgender medicine (especially regarding surgery), perfect can't be the enemy of good here. Because people are dying.

It seems to depend how long it's taken and when it's started: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases...horia/in-depth/pubertal-blockers/art-20459075

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2444866417301101

This is not an easy choice, and it is a significant break from pretty much every other legal pattern to have children under the age of 12 making serious medical decisions...to take something that is still being considered "off label" by FDA and seems far from consensus among physicians regarding long-term medical effects on the patients who take them. Though children's wishes should still matter, and as it's been pointed out puberty itself also has consequences. To treat this as an issue with a clear/obvious answer seems reckless.

Discussing ramifications is important, hopefully without that being done or construed as "conversion therapy".

The first article directly contradicts your point.

Use of GnRH analogues doesn't cause permanent changes in an adolescent's body. Instead, it pauses puberty, providing time to determine if a child's gender identity is long lasting. It also gives children and their families time to think about or plan for the psychological, medical, developmental, social and legal issues ahead.

Second article has been rebuked by experts to the point where one of the primary sources that the author cited disagreed with Guido Giovanardi's work. While this piece is not a scholarly work, it does rebuke Giovanardi's article thoroughly and is well cited. It also contains an interview with the author of Giovanardi's primary source who is very critical of Giovanardi.

It appears to me pediatricians specialising in trans children find puberty blockers controversial in the same way that climate scientists find climate change controversial. They don't, but there's a lot of bad faith and biased criticism thrown their way in order for the Right and fellow travelers to muddy the waters.

Straw, and yet more examples of why it's difficult to have actual discussions.

Why is it unacceptable for a transperson to take sweeping generalisations personally when it is apparently acceptable for you, a cis person, to take a generalisation (that is not even comparable to what JKR said, lets be real) personally? Its extremely hypocritical.

Actually no. I find animal abuse to be very offensive for example, but I don't have any pets and there's no clear logic whereby one would conclude animal abuse offending me is doing so because it's "personal". Similar deal for other offensive language - it doesn't need to be taken personally to be offensive.

You're committing a definist fallacy. Common definitions of "taking something personally" are equivalent to "taking offense". Your definition is unusual, honestly its still unclear what you think the difference between "taking something personally" and "taking offense" is and nobody else in this thread seems to agree with your definition.

I believe you're also misrepresenting the extent to which humans can control their behaviors and to a lesser extent their emotions. This is a skill our society would benefit great from rediscovering in larger numbers.

And I think that you are exaggerating the amount someone can control their emotions in the face of rhetoric designed to upset and offend! In addition to that, your continued insistence on this point is sounding more and more like tone policing, which ironically is a form of ad hominem attack!

You claim you wish for an environment that discourages the committing of informal fallacies yet you have continually committed informal fallacies all throughout this thread. It is utterly hypocritical.

I'm not disputing that though. Her logical inconsistency and willingness to lash out in spite of it bother me too. It does also bother me when arguments which decry her reasoning turn around and use similar reasoning (or lack thereof) though.

Nobody in this thread has said anything about JKR or cispeople that is even remotely comparable to what she said about transpeople.

Ah okay. I chose not to cover a lot of that because in order to build my argument properly I'd have had to go back to things we were already asked to stop doing. I mulled over starting a new thread as I mentioned earlier, and once it is possible to have a RD thread that adheres to RD rules I might do so.

Not going to comment on this further as I cannot without breaking CFC rules.

Conversion therapy is bad (causes harm without any apparent/demonstrable benefit), so I'm not inclined to argue it further because it doesn't seem anyone here disagrees with that.

Correct.

In the US it can take months to get any non-emergency procedure. Even routine and safe procedures like gallbladder removal, which has unqualified medical acceptance and is roughly as safe as you can get in terms of surgery, can still take longer than a month and multiple physicians to get done. So transition surgery does not appear to be special/singled out in that regard.

You're missing my point. Imagine that if a couple were to get legally married, both parties had to have their appendixes removed beforehand, even if neither party has appendicitis. That would be completely absurd, even in cases where surgery was subsidised by the state and the wait times were minimal the surgery is wholly unnecessary. While in some cases the removal of the appendix is desirable, elective surgery should not be enforced upon all people who want to marry. The same logic applies to transgender people who wish to change their gender.

Blocking transitioning before divorce is just as arbitrary as the grouping I complained about earlier, unless the marriage/divorce laws are similarly draconian (I don't know which countries you are referencing, but in some the problem would not be that they're arbitrary, but rather that they're consistently oppressive).

Again, you are completely missing the point. If there is a married couple that want to stay together and one of the participants wishes to change their gender legally, they should not be required to divorce beforehand. And almost every country that does not have same sex marriage has laws such as these. If you want an example, Japan. Japan actually has even more onerous requirements than I remembered, its really bad.

I thought legal definitions were sex rather than gender? If countries care about gender at all...the better question is why they care.

The law has lagged quite a bit behind the modern understanding of gender and sex. In many places, important documents such as passports and driver's licenses use sex and gender interchangeably.

I am not remotely equipped to have a discussion about whether states should record their citizen's gender. It is completely outside of the scope of this thread regardless. Governments, corporations and other major entities consider gender important enough to acknowledge on formal documentation. I don't see this changing anytime soon. Transpeople should have an easy way to legally change their gender under these circumstances. I don't get why that is so hard to understand.

Police/laws ignoring constitutional rights should be punished consistently and transpeople are no exception.

Applying laws consistently to everyone should be the main goal, and the fact that they aren't being fairly applied to transpeople is one of the principle issues in this thread. You fix that by enforcing the law, or if it isn't applying rights to everyone to fix the law because it's broken. This usually is not improved by throwing extra kludge rules on top of an already kludged system.

Please refer to post 920 in this thread.

 

[Arakhor]

Moderator Action: Due to a persistent inability for posters to actually follow mod text, this thread will now end. Infractions for poor behaviour will follow as deserved.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889