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Comment by x1798DE | Hacker News Reader

I can't say that I follow the news on identity politics closely, but my understanding from liberal sources is that conservatives believe that people should use the bathroom assigned to their biological sex, and they don't know or care about whether someone is post-op or pre-op or genderqueer or any of the other gradations of gender. So, again, it seems nonsensical to explain the subtle gradations of gender identity and sexual orientation that have emerged in recent years (i.e. past 30-40 years, say) by saying that conservatives were requiring this information somehow.

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>and they don't know or care about whether someone is post-op or pre-op or genderqueer or any of the other gradations of gender.

But to enforce the policy you have to care about precisely this, because there are plenty of transmen who look like men and transwomen who look like women. So in practice you have to go around asking every man/woman in the bathroom whether they have a penis/vagina. If you "don't care" whether someone is genderqueer or not, then simply let men use the men's bathroom and women use the women's bathroom, without bothering to check their genitals first.

Again, my understanding is that they don't care what gender you say you are or where you are on the physical spectrum, they care about your gender at birth. This does not necessitate anything further than, "I was born male" or "I was born female", referring to biological sex, except in edge cases like chromosomal abnormalities and ambiguous genitalia. Handling cases of biological gender ambiguities is not covered by the emerging vocabulary around the gender spectrum, so again, those distinctions are entirely meaningless to conservatives.

If your hypothesis were true and these increasingly precise distinctions of sexual and gender identity are a response to conservatives, why did they emerge only after liberal attitudes became prevalent enough that people could openly embrace these identities? One would expect that if they cared about these subtleties, these differences would have been more important when the conservative viewpoint was near universal.

I think maybe you’re not picturing how such a regulation would work in practice. Suppose someone who looks like a woman goes into the women’s bathroom. Do you ask them if they have a penis, or do you just let them use the bathroom? To enforce the regulation that people have to use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex, you would have to continually ask people about their genitalia. In other words, you’d have to continually take an interest in whether any given woman is a transwoman or a cis woman.

Also, I didn’t quite say that increasingly precise distinctions of sexual and general identity are a response to conservatives. I said that it’s because of conservatives that these distinctions are thought to be (and in practice are) very important. If we lived in some kind of free-wheeling hippy society, then these aspects of people would be of the same level of interest as, say, their dietary preferences.

As things currently stand, if you are a woman with a penis, there are lots of people ready and waiting to tell you that you're not really a woman. It's hardly surprising that transwomen take their gender identity very seriously when it's constantly under attack. Nor is it surprising that they construct new categories (e.g. 'transwoman') when the existing categories are so rigidly policed.

> Do you ask them if they have a penis, or do you just let them use the bathroom

And in case anybody thinks this is just hyperbole:

http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/self-appointed-bathroom-c...

> I think maybe you’re not picturing how such a regulation would work in practice. Suppose someone who looks like a woman goes into the women’s bathroom. Do you ask them if they have a penis, or do you just let them use the bathroom?

If you're trying to reason about what social conservatives think, it probably doesn't help to concoct some strawman half-LGBT half-social conservative ideology. A social conservative ideology doesn't have the dilemma you describe because, for them, gender expression should conform to sex.

Any...

> interest in whether any given woman is a transwoman or a cis woman

...was foisted on social conservatives from outside. They don't have an innate interest or need for such finely-graded labels.

Conservatives, if they’re in favor of restricting bathroom use based on biological gender, have to decide whether or not they want to enforce this regulation. Enforcing it requires attending to the difference between cis women and transwomen. So clearly they do have the dilemma I described.

> Enforcing it requires attending to the difference between cis women and transwomen. So clearly they do have the dilemma I described.

Conservatives of the flavor you are talking about consider trans-women to be men. They don't need to differentiate because they are trying to impose a simpler rule than that. In practice, if they wanted to enforce their rule, they could just require ID to use a toilet and require that the ID specify gender at birth (as verified by birth certificate). The current state of the person's genitals does not have to play into it.

Obviously enforcing such a rule (or really any bathroom rule) strictly would be incredibly annoying and basically pointless, and in practice it would be enforced about as intermittently as almost any other rules, but at no point do they actually care whether or not you currently have a penis.

>Conservatives of the flavor you are talking about consider trans-women to be men.

This point is not lost on me. I noted it in several of the posts that you're replying to.

>They don't need to differentiate

To enforce the rule, they need to differentiate between transwomen and cis women, since they do not consider the former to be women, and think that cis women, but not transwomen, should be allowed to use the women's restroom. You acknowledge this yourself in other parts of your post.

>In practice, if they wanted to enforce their rule, they could just require ID to use a toilet and require that the ID specify gender at birth (as verified by birth certificate). The current state of the person's genitals does not have to play into it.

This is a weird and pedantic objection. You're saying that they care about whether or not the person in question was born with a penis rather than whether or not they currently have one. Ok, but so what? Then you have to ask everyone who goes to the women's bathroom whether they were born with a penis.

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