ChatterBank1 min ago
What's It All About?
96 Answers
Sorry for a dumb question, but can anyone explain to me what is the essence of the issue about the trans question? Why is Ms Rowling so passionate about it?
I hope for a calm explanation rather than an attack.
Here’s hoping...
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I think it is that she said that there are girls and boys on the planet and that claiming that you are the opposite of your birth gender doesn't make it true.
I believe that thete are people who genuinely feel that they have been born the wrong sex. There people deserve our support. They are in the minority.
for many years people like Rowling and Germaine Greer have campaigned for equal rights for women. They're still paid less for equal work, but they're getting there.
There have also long been a small minority of people who believe they've been born into the wrong sex and would like to have an operation that gives them something like the opposite sex's body. You may remember the journalist James Morris, who became Jan Morris many years ago.
However, feminists who have, for instance, fought to raise the profile of women's sports are irritated when sportsmen who aren't quite good enough to compete as men announce that they're really women, and proceed to beat women becuase they still have essentially a stronger male body.
Other fields of battle include public facilities - should men be able to to walk into women's changing rooms or toilets, announcing that they're entitled to because they're women too? (More troubling - women's refuges.)
Mosly, I've never been bothered by trans people; I don't feel my human rights are being infringed. But sports will have to decide whether male/female distincitions should contine; new public buildings may have to include unisex toilets (as trains, planes and my house do).
But people do get awfully upset.
jno. In France where I live for a short time each year, the local swimming baths has small changing cubicles which anyone can use - much better than large rooms full of men or women stripping off and often puffing vile aerosols and rubbing their privates with towels in front of other people. It's a simple question of sensible design.
The rules for competitive sports is a different matter and I don't know how that should be addressed.
Is that the real issue?
Transwomen are men and the inclusion of them into 'women-only' areas erodes these spaces.
I understand there are genuinely some men who feel as if they were born in the wrong bodies, however, many current TRAs are simply AGP men who wish to appropriate female spaces, etc. to satisfy their own fetishes.
If you have to mangle the law to allow these men 'with special feelings' into female spaces, how on earth can you differentiate between those men and regular men.
How can violent male rapists claim 'womanhood' and find themselves imprisoned with vulnerable women - now made more vulnerable by these very circumstances.
It is intolerable.
I think the business of women's refuges is the trickiest issue. As far as I know it's still legal to set them up; but women-only spaces look awkward at a time when women are clamouring to be allowed into the all-male Garrick club. Somebody's going to have to come up with a fine distinction to show why one's okay and the other isn't. Maybe somebody has.
Also... Not all people are rapists. Women could find themselves in spaces with hungry lesbian women? And men could ditto with predatory homosexuals. I suspect that men are probably more aggressive than women, but I doubt if many men pretend to be women just to be able to lock themselves in a room with a load of women - I'd prefer to be in a place with lone women (e.g. Epping Forest)
Agreed.
But there are facilities which don't/won't provide them. Or there are communal areas within these changing facilities where TW push the boundaries.
At Hampstead Heath there were 3 natural bathing ponds. One was men only, one was mixed and one was women only. Now 'men' are allowed into the women only pond. So men can access all 3 but women are only allowed in 2 mixed ponds. It's the slow erosion of these facilities which concerns most right-minded people.
there definitely have been cases of male predators claiming to be female. Then again it's rather similar to arguments that were being made a few years back for Muslim women to be banned from covering their faces because they might be males with evil intent. When I tried to find some, it tuned out more males with evil intent were disguising themselves as Santa Claus.
But as I said, there must be some sort of argument to be made for safe spaces for women; I just don't know what it is.
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