Comment by dani__german
5 days ago
As far as the "left", one need only consider the ideological rigidity around the topic of transvestites to see that specific, thoughtful, deep, data driven, and evidence based rhetoric is abandoned in favor of not hurting the feelings of a group of people prone to threaten harm to themselves for political and social gain.
Don't ever forget that the left cant clearly articulate what a woman is without resorting to circular reasoning.
This is probably pointless to reply to, but for anyone else reading this:
For starters, the current right-wing hate campaign is targeting transgender people, not transvestites since the latter simply means people who wear clothing associated with the opposite gender, which is quite common in right-wing circles.
Aside from that silliness, let's highlight the "specific, thoughtful, data driven, evidence based rhetoric" that is "not hurting the feelings of a group of people", as if "hurt feelings" were all that has happened.
Also, hurt feelings matter. Humans are our feelings. They're who we are and what we are. People be hurt in a large variety of ways and they're all bad. It's trivial to demonstrate that non-fatal gash on your body is considerably less worse than being, say, ostracized and outcast from the community you grew up in.
On a related note, why is "the right" so obsessed with defining what a woman is? What are the data driven and evidence based rhetorical reasons for coming up with a rigorous and definitive definition of woman?
The idea that evidence or logic is involved in any of this is laughable.
Edit: Nobody can come up with a good definition for what a planet it is either, but somehow we manage to stagger onwards.
Well, the evidence is that when males and females compete against each other in sport, the males tend to win, so if you think womens' sport should exist, then you need to define who is included and who is excluded from that category.
And when big males compete against small males the big ones tend to win, so uh, what are we arguing about?
Female only categories are always going to be a compromise, their literal existence is defined by excluding people from being able to participate. So you have to draw the line somewhere and say "this person is allowed and this person isn't". I'm sorry it's not as easy as just asking if someone has a uterus or something but just because things are tricky is no excuse to give up.
And frankly, this whole argument is incredibly disingenuous. You didn't give a damn about the sanctity of women's sports 5 years ago and when the right finds a new minority to demonize, you'll happily forget all about them.
There's a word for this, mote and bailey fallacy? The advanced premise is that we should discriminate and hate transgender people and then when challenged you fall back to something something women's sports.
Are women's sports good? Sure, we should support them. Is that worth demonizing a minority and blaming them for society's ills? I hope not. There's like 5 transgender people PER STATE competing in female only sports and 99% of the time they aren't even winning. It really doesn't affect you or anyone else.
But because of this "issue" that people like you keep repeating, people are trying to pass laws that require genital inspectors for our child athletes. Think about that for a second. What exactly are we trying to accomplish here?
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