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Comment by soligern | Hacker News Reader

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Hi, trans person here. My main concerns in life are having a job, a home, health, family, and friends. When I go out in public, I have the same hopes and fears as anyone else I know, except I also worry about being accosted on the street or in a public restroom while I'm minding my own business. Since you brought it up, at what point do you view transgender people's lives as becoming ideological?

I would like a world where this does not happen but I also think that none of the things you say are issues of politics/equal rights. While not nice, these things seem to be well within the rights of the other people and I don‘t think you should try to force to change their minds through political means/power. I actually think the US has quite a good way of dealing with this by allowing a lot of differences between the states. In that way you can go where you‘re treated best and the other people can go where they like the lifestyles of the others the best. Forcing a national average is a recipe for disaster/division.

> While not nice, these things seem to be well within the rights of the other people and I don‘t think you should try to force to change their minds through political means/power. I actually think the US has quite a good way of dealing with this by allowing a lot of differences between the states. In that way you can go where you‘re treated best and the other people can go where they like the lifestyles of the others the best.

What if that logic was applied to other disregards for human life and rights such as segregation or slavery ?

It's easy to say that someone should "go where you're treated best", but I have done that, and besides the cost and logistics, I still grieve that I don't feel safe in the city where I grew up, where friends and family still live, and that I still call home.

If I told the other people that they're the ones who need to move away, not me, they'd feel just as torn. We all have to figure out a way to live next to each other.

The ideological part is the basis behind changes to policy and law such that single-sex spaces become mixed-sex spaces.

For example, opening up women's locker rooms to men who say they are women. This is to the benefit of the men who desire such access, but to the detriment of women who want to keep their female-only safe spaces. Whether cases like this constitite a justifiable change in policy or not is where the ideological divides lie.

Hi! As a trans person, what is your take on the cancellation of JKR and when someone got fired for IIRC just using the term "woman" in UK? I'm not in US or UK but I see those issues as ideological.

The issues you listed are completely fair but some think trans people being safe, having a job and being generally equal can coexist with the concept of a woman, but some don't think so. I guess/hope the above comment referred to that.

I think that J.K. Rowling's public statements show that at the very least, she has a strawman conception of what most trans people are like and what our motives are, that a much greater proportion of us are dangerous predators than actually are, and that trans rights activism as a whole is in her words "offering cover to predators." She's also platformed a lot of people who use phrases like "reducing" the number of transgender people, which is ominous. I'm not familiar with the UK incident you mentioned (I'm in the US), but Rowling in particular is concerned about a lot more dire things than an abstract concept of who is and isn't a woman.

That being said, she is still rich, has movies and games in active production, and many of my friends consume that media without even being aware of her controversies, so cancellation is the wrong word for what's happening to and around her.

I thought said incident is how attacks on her began but it looks like the trigger was her sarcastic objection to phrase "people who menstruate".

Either way I can't really blame her if making a tweet about media allergy to word "woman" prompted death threats. Platforming, don't know enough to comment right now (though AFAIK people are not going out on protests against Joe Rogan like they did against her and we all know the characters Rogan is platforming...)

I consider myself mostly left but I think the world should be big enough for both trans people and women-referred-to-as-women (who have their own long going battle for equality) to coexist. If it is wrong please let me know why. But for now if someone treats using word "woman" as equivalent to attacking trans people then I write that off as "ideological issue" since it's obviously not attacking trans people. Looks like Rowling couldn't write that off and needed to comment because she was personally attacked and also felt the need to defend women as she is one.

Hope that helps clarify how people can be completely pro trans equality and yet be frustrated with some of what's happening as ideological agenda pushing.

Transphobia isn't cool. Sorry human rights are too "leftist" a position

What human rights? Sure killing or harassing cross dressers is abhorrent but otherwise no one has been bothering these people to begin with.

Other than (killing or) harrassing no one has been bothering ... ??

Just how blindly dismissive can a single comment get?

I'm not on any tran bandwagon but it's plain they've been persecuted in western culture for centuries to date.

This comment clearly comes from a place of ignorance. This attitude is part of the problem too. You just need to listen to them and they can tell you all they ways that people have been bothering them. Just because you can’t conceptualize how life can be hard when you have an incongruity between your physical body and mental self, it doesn’t mean that you can hand wave away other people’s struggles with this attitude of “ahhh they’re fine no one’s bothering them”. Shift your perspective to see the problem

Ah, they're not trans now. They're "cross dressers"

You're very much arguing in good faith already :)

If you want moderate views to prevail, you need to be working for ranked choice voting. The system we have now rewards extreme candidates. All the internet does is supercharge that. If we don't adopt a voting system that enables voters to punish extreme candidates instead of having to choose between the least undesirable of them, we're just going to keep on having despairing comment threads about the state of politics.

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