thelopa

I think you made the classic mistake of assuming that terms such as “birthing parent” are a way of including trans women. They aren’t. They’re for the benefit of trans men and non-binary individuals who are able to give birth. This isn’t about including people incapable of giving birth. It’s about including people who ARE.

When my OneWheel nosedived, I was completely thrown for a loop. It stops abruptly (more so than a skateboard usually will), your stance is heavily restricted (due to the balance requirement), and the board messes with your trajectory and balance as it tips. It kind of throws you toward the pavement while a skateboard just throws you forwards.

I love it, but it is definitely a vehicle you need to be careful with.

However, if only ~900 people in the whole country have a severe reaction to vaccines but they save millions of people annually by preventing deadly and debilitating diseases, then you’ve shot yourself in the foot! That statistic is strong evidence that vaccines are very safe and likely produce more good than harm!

For what it’s worth, I’m a trans woman, and I’m well aware of some of the discourse around this topic already (both positions that are pro- and anti- “trans women are women”). I tried very hard to avoid injecting any of those details into it, though. I wanted to do a “reasoning from first principles” sort of analysis of the idea rather than try to recap the discussions that are happening in feminist spheres.

That’s not to say that “sex isn’t real” or some absurd position like that. There is a real phenomenon in biology where genetic and phenotypical variance tends to follow a limited set of patterns. Biologists call those patterns “sex”. But, the idea that “sex” as we use it in normal day-to-day life is a rigidly defined system based on hard biological facts is laughably false. When was the last time you insisted on seeing someone’s genetic karyotype test results? When was the last time you asked someone to drop their pants so you could examine their genitalia and determine their sex?

The phrase “sex is a social construct” is technically true in the same way that “chairs are a social construct” is true. The word describes a fuzzy subset of the set of all things, and what we consider in or out of the set is largely based on what we think should belong to it, and that is absolutely influenced by societal expectations. Where do chairs end and tables begin? Where does the female sex end?

Once you get to that point, the phrase almost has no meaning. If all word definitions are social constructs, then that’s table stakes and it doesn’t make sense to call out a specific word as having that property. Surely the phrase “is a social construct” must mean something more than “is like any other word”. Indeed, the meaning of that phrase is larger than what it literally says. There is a socially defined meaning that is attached to it. That phrase implies the word in question “is arbitrarily defined (more than most words)” and “is up for interpretation (more than most words)”.

If you agree with me this far, then the right way to frame this discussion is “should we pin ‘sex’ as it is used in every day life to specific physical properties or should we allow it to be more porous?”. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. If we pin it, for example, to genetic karyotype, then we need to stop using it in contexts where the genetics of the person are unknown and must admit the existence of several additional sexes (e.g. X, XXY) AND recognize it’s no longer useful for describing the phenomenon of what a person looks like or how their body works. If we make it porous, then we will endlessly debate about whether boundary cases fall into one bucket or the other and possibly hurt some feelings along the way.

The fun thing is that we get to pick what words mean, and we get to pick what we do with “sex”. Language is, after all, a social construct.

I have really enjoyed the puzzles it has posed in the form of circuit network logic for automating rockets and spaceships. The issue described in TFA is just the tip of the iceberg. My factory has deadlocked in a number of interesting and unique ways over the course of the 600 hours I’ve played thus far. I’ve enjoyed the mod. It has some very interesting ideas and challenges. It’s a shame those puzzles are hidden behind so much slog.

I would describe that experience for the trans person as a “vehement feeling or expression”, and inflicting a violent state on someone qualifies as “an instance of violent treatment or procedure”.

This isn’t a uniquely trans feeling, either. I have friends who had very bad relationships with their parents — so bad that they changed their last names. Like me and my deadname, my friends said that hearing their old family name could dredge up a lot of unpleasant memories. Like me, they wanted to put some distance between themselves and their pasts.

Yes, many people change their family name when they get married, and those people usually don’t freak out when they hear their original surname. However, that should not be considered representative of how everyone feels.

I invite you to take a moment and think about whether your view of “TRAs” is based on a realistic picture of the world or not. Every group has extremists with weird ideas. Some conservatives think gay people are agents of satan. Some liberals don’t see the value in free speech and want the state to run everything. It’s easy to find extreme outliers and then demonize a much broader group using them. Is your view of “TRAs” characterized by outliers or by the action of the average pro-trans person?

Afterwards the teacher chided everyone who didn’t read the entire paper before starting and did the silly instructions. I was bothered because I had read the paper and thought carefully about how I would handle it. I still think that assignment was dumb.

Trans people often need to grapple with “internalized transphobia”. I experienced this firsthand when I realized I was trans and then felt a wave of disgust and horror. I felt it the first time I went to a trans group meetup and felt embarrassed to be seen with trans people. I felt it every time I was terrified of anyone knowing I was trans. I’m not alone in having these experiences, but my experiences were probably more on the extreme side. Almost no trans person has the luxury of being entirely free of internalized transphobia, and internalized transphobia can manifest in one’s political beliefs. If we shunned every single person who ever disagreed with the “groupthink” then there wouldn’t be anyone left. By necessity, we need to welcome and encourage the process of people learning and growing.

That’s a far cry from the idea that the trans community expels anyone who is critical of them.