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This argument, that it’s the trans community that is intolerant and not those who don’t fully accept trans gender identities as legitimate, is simplistic and in bad faith.

The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated.

The classic examples of these are bathrooms and athletics. Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity. It sure feels like intolerance when this choice is denied from trans people.

I don’t know your own personal views, but it’s certainly not the case that “the vast majority of people” are aligned with trans people on the above issues.

> Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity.

I know I'm not the first person ever one to bring this up, but it's unclear to me how letting someone with (largely) the physique of a man compete against women is acceptable.

There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female, and that reason still overall holds for someone who is trans. There's a lot of gray area here depending on if and when they undertook HRT, sure, but labelling this as "intolerance" is not right in my book.

It seems to me that the only fair way to let trans and cis athletes compete on level ground on the same event is to have a competition that completely ignores both sex and gender.

I would be all for such events, and while you are it allow doping and ban all equipment including clothing. Make it truly even field.

> There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female

This division is arbitrary. The reason for this is the premise of fair competition that identical people should compete. Yet white males dominate male swimming whereas black males dominate male sprinting. There have been physiological explanations based on center of mass things afaik. Knowing that, why don't we split the competitions accordingly? Martial arts have categories based on weight, why shouldn't we have categories based on arm-length or blood volume? It's easy to see that the whole premise of fair competition is very naïve: where do you stop? What are the criteria for determining if competitors are "identical enough"? Choosing these criteria will be a political choice. Transgender people in sports are disturbing the status quo, but they just made apparent the inherent instability of the thing.

Now i don't know about you, but when i personally do sports, for one i'm not good enough that physiological characteristics make the greatest differences: this problem mostly appears when we reach the limits, by "optimal training". Second, i'm playing as an amateur, that is for entertainment and for the art of it, which means that i will mostly play to be part of a good game, show off and see nice skill displays, and share this experience with other people, some of them with different levels of training and physical capabilities.

I just wanted to say that this thread is imho unrelated to the issues of transgender and more to the fact that competitive sports is broken and the political struggle between professional and amateur sport.

> This division is arbitrary

what the hell, how is Men's and Women's sports categorization arbitrary? its clearly defined who plays in which category.

What the hell are you talking about? Being well-defined and arbitrary are two orthogonal things.

>The reason for this is the premise of fair competition that identical people should compete.

No, actually the reason is that it makes both watching and competing more interesting. A competition where women never got anywhere near first place would mean women would simply stop showing up (or vice versa). A boxing championship with no weight classes would mean no lightweight boxers would sign up.

On the other hand, with enough subcategories you can get to the point where some competitors win by default, or where you have championships of one or two matches.

So no, it's not arbitrary to separate competitors by some physical characteristics and not others. There are practical reasons to do so that are unrelated to the whims of organizers.

From a practical point of view, how do you imagine this playing out?

If we remove the gender division from, say, javelin throwing (random choice; current difference in world records there is currently 30% for reference). Now there won't be any (cis) women competing at the top level any more.

So somebody goes ahead and creates a women's division (or whatever you want to call it). Should we somehow forbid this? Or would it be required that they accept any transgender individual in any state of transition? And either case is just "back to square 1" - no cis women have a chance. I don't see how "let's remove the 'women' category in this competition in the interest of fairness to trans people" is improving things for anyone...

>The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated.

This is an interesting one.

I definitely find being told I have to accept that "trans women are women" off putting and like the Aesop's fable with the wind and the sun, it feels like the wind blowing and makes me want to hold on to that jacket tighter.

The way I see it, trans women are trans women, and trans men are trans men. They occupy a different category in my mind than either.

I'm trying to imagine how I would feel going to either bathroom as a trans person, and the only answer I can come up with is "riddled with anxiety".

> The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.

Who says so? What has been your personal experience with "the transgender community"? If you're seeing it through the polarized lens of online (specifically big platforms) interaction, then for sure you are seeing it as intolerant. But the same could be said about almost every pov online: most of what we get to see widely is vocal, shallow, unsubstantiated takes. Because that's what get viral.

So for one, there is no such thing as a "transgender community". There are most surely publicized simplified canons of what a transgender person is like, just like there is for "the average white dude", "the academic leftist", "the trump fan" or "the new age craftsy person". The thing is, there are very few person actually like that and the one that are, are usually like that because of tremendous influence of online platforms on their views.

All in all, with all respect, i think you are fighting a strawman. Personally, my course of action in this matter (shallowness, simplifications and argumentative intolerance getting more widespread) is not to fight against it for people you disagree with, because they for sure won't listen to you, but to fight against it for people you actually agree with. This is the thing: in every of these "communities" you describe (transgender, religious, could be anything) there is actually little internal cohesion and there are different political ideals interacting. I prefer to put my own house in order. In fact that's the only thing i can meaningfully impact.

> What has been your personal experience with "the transgender community"?

I am a lesbian woman and in a gay dating app I have been receiving dozens of death threats and I was even banned after I got reported by a group of people because I put this sentence in those exact words in my profile:

“I support LGBTQ+ rights and I am a proud member of this wonderfully vibrant community. I welcome all transgender people and count many as my friends. However, without causing anyone upset I would like to state that I am only interested in dating female bodied women and I would kindly ask everyone to respect my sexual preferences.”

I’ve been a lesbian for 39 years and I never felt this hated and attacked by any other group of people. I am not saying that transgender people attack me, but it’s transgender activists (often men who identify as men) who say the most vile and nasty things to me because of my sexual preference which I tried to express in the most respectful way.

> The vast majority of people have no issue with transgender individuals. They just know that a man with a mental health condition is in principle still a man and we shouldn’t be ostracised to state truths like this.

Objection: assumes facts not in evidence.

> The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.

I doubt that is the main reason. Society has been pretty clear for a long time that certain people found trans people too strange to accept them. Gay people have been treated the same way. I think most people that don’t like trans people are probably also uncomfortable with gay people even if they are more likely to say it’s okay to be gay.

> If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot.

You can avoid being called a bigot by understanding the following basic concepts.

Sex and gender are two distinct ideas. Gender as described by Judith Butler is a kind of performance that you do. It starts in childhood where we give boys the color blue and toy trucks and we give girls the color pink and dolls. Men wear pants and never wear dresses and women wear dresses and skits and use a purse. A man never wears a purse and if he has anything close it’s called a bag, definitely not a purse.

The above are made up concepts. Clothes and bags and pink and blue are not biological reality, they’re just made up by society. They’re part of a performance of gender. You can change your gender just by changing your performance.

Sex is a biological concept that relates to what secondary sex characteristics your body presents. Hormone levels, genitals, etc. this is still don’t a binary concept as intersex people exist and are something like 1% of the population. It’s also unclear if someone completely changes their hormones and has surgery to change their genitals, what is the point of saying “you’re still a man”? Such a statement is likely to bring up feelings of pain and misery the person has had from people who have been intolerant towards them. It also is unclear if you’re referring to biological sex or gender, and trans people are often terrified that they’re not performing their gender properly.

It’s like going up to a fat person and saying “wow you’re fat” and then walking around saying “fat people are intolerant because they get upset when I call them fat”. Maybe on some level you’re right, but you’re being an asshole if you insist on saying that. And again, if a trans person has severely changed their sex hormones, the concept of “sex never changes” is shaky anyway.

So stop trying to tell trans women they’re really men. Such a statement completely misses all the subtle realities of such a statement, serves no productive purpose, and is rude as hell.

But if you deep down inside hold the belief that transgenderism is "a mental health condition" wouldn't you want to "help" those individuals that you believe are suffering from a disease by telling them that they are sick and need help/treatment?

The dysphoria of feeling like you're in the wrong body is the mental illness, there currently is no fix for this except for transition. All outcomes improve by social transition with family support, notably outcomes do not improve by telling transgender people that they're mentally ill and that they must accept their gender assigned at birth.

Being transgender alone does not constitute a mental health condition. Dysphoria is the culprit. If people could transition at will The Culture style there would be zero confusion on this point.