Quote:Oh look, another bigot jumps on the "trans-men are pedophiles" bandwagon.

Quote:Over the past few years, transgender issues have moved into the spotlight in a big way. Caitlin Jenner came out on prime-time TV. Laverne Cox was featured on the cover of Time. The White House appointed its first openly trans employee. These cultural changes, though, have led to an ugly backlash. States including North Carolina and Kansas have passed or are considering legislation that limits the rights of transgender people. And the political debates around these issues have perpetuated many myths.

1. Transgender people pose a threat in public bathrooms.

This is the central argument by supporters of “bathroom bills,” which make it illegal for transgender people to use restrooms that conform to their gender identity. “The danger is real from sexual predators in women’s restrooms,” Christian author Frank Turek wrote at Townhall. “I think any child or young adult has a right to have their privacy protected when they’re in various stages of undress,” Kansas state Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook argued. North Carolina legislators defended their own measure by saying that it provides for the “protection of the women and children of our state.”

This is flat-out wrong. Many transgender people already use the bathrooms that fit their gender identity. The state of Maryland, hundreds of cities and dozens of schools ban bathroom discrimination. And there have been no reported cases of such laws leading to harassment.

In truth, “bathroom bills” might endanger one group: transgender people. According to one study, 70 percent of trans respondents had been harassed, assaulted or denied access when attempting to use a public bathroom. More than half reported suffering physical ailments, such as dehydration or kidney problems, because they were afraid to use the restroom while out.

2. A 5-year-old doesn’t know enough about gender to be transgender.

Every so often, a media outlet will publish a profile of a child who believes he or she is transgender, and the story will prompt disbelief. “Kids that age can only wear what you put on them, sport the haircut you assign them, play with the toys you give them, and mostly believe what you tell them they should believe,” conservative blogger Matt Walsh wrote about a case in San Diego. “Ryland, the 5 year old girl who ‘transitioned’ into a boy, isn’t transgender, she’s confused,” Joshua Riddle, founder of the Young Conservatives site, declared about the same story.

On the contrary, children as young as 2 can present with gender incongruence. According to the American Psychiatric Association, cross-gender behaviors often start between 2 and 4 years old. One study by the TransYouth Project found that kids as young as 5 respond to psychological gender-association tests, which evaluate how people understand their gender roles. Researchers have also found no relationship between gender incongruence and parenting styles. Transgender children appear in the homes of parents who are Republicans or Democrats, in the military or in civilian life, and regardless of racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds.

3. Being transgender is relatively new.

Much of the coverage of recent transgender debates describes the condition as nascent. LGBTQ Nation dates the movement’s start to the 1980s. Christianity Today calls it a recent “phenomenon.”

Certainly, transgender politics have shifted. But gender-bending has been around a long time. Ancient Greek mythology references feminine souls in male bodies. In “Metamorphoses,” the Roman poet Ovid wrote about a man, Tiresias, who became a woman when he struck two copulating snakes. The Chevalier d’Eon, an 18th-century French politician, spent the second half of her life as a woman. (“Eonism,” a term for cross-gendered behavior, refers to the diplomat.)

In the United States and Europe, doctors have written about transgender patients since at least the 19th century. By the middle of the 20th, physicians had concluded that a transgender person’s gender identity was deeply felt, unresponsive to efforts to change the person’s mind and not necessarily accompanied by psychiatric problems.

4. Transgender people often come to regret transitioning.

One of the most common and misleading tropes about transgender people is that many regret making their transitions. There are websites, YouTube channels and even books dedicated to the topic. One writer, Walt Heyer (who regrets his own transition), claims that 20 percent of transgender people regret transitioning, 41 percent attempt suicide and at least 60 percent suffer from some kind of mental illness. “Suicide and regret,” he writes, “remain the dark side of transgender life.”

These statistics and misstatements are based on outdated research. More recent studies suggest that less than 4 percent of people who get gender-reassignment surgery regret it. Researchers have also found that the surgery dramatically reduces suicide rates among trans people. That makes sense — the surgery can improve self-esteem, body image and general life satisfaction. This is why the international standard of care for adolescents and adults in many countries is to offer transition services.

Of course, some people regret transitioning. A handful may even transition back. But the vast majority do not.

5. Male-to-female transgender athletes have a competitive advantage.

In January, the International Olympic Committee announced that trans athletes can compete as the gender they identify with, whether or not they’ve undergone gender-reassignment surgery. Columnist Janice Turner wrote sarcastically that the new policy was “great news — unless you are a woman athlete.” Trans athletes themselves have faced similar blowback. When mixed martial arts fighter Fallon Fox came out in 2013, competitors complained that she should be barred because of her “advantage.”

These critics argue that transgender women have all the biological strengths — more muscle mass, greater lung capacity — of male athletes. But in reality, most of that dominance is pegged to hormones such as testosterone, not sex organs. Hormone therapy for trans women involves taking a testosterone-blocking drug along with an estrogen supplement. This usually leads to a decrease in muscle mass and bone density, as well as an increase in fat storage. “Together,” one trans runner and researcher wrote in The Washington Post, “these changes lead to a loss of speed, strength and endurance — all key components of athleticism.” To date, trans athletes have not won a disproportionate number of races.

(05-22-2016, 12:57 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Oh look at the libtard posting an opinion propaganda piece as if it were facts.  Of course to normalize a mental disorder.

Not an Opinion Piece from a respected Psychological Journal

It's times like these I miss Rani.

(05-22-2016, 03:16 PM)Odin Wrote:

(05-22-2016, 12:57 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Oh look at the libtard posting an opinion propaganda piece as if it were facts.  Of course to normalize a mental disorder.

Not an Opinion Piece from a respected Psychological Journal

It's times like these I miss Rani.

You know that gender realignment surgery and hormone therapy IS the primary treatment for gender dysphoria, right?

Quote:Also, you seem to be implying that because it is in the DSM that gender dysphoria is somehow a delusional disorder that needs to be "cured", as if it were Schizophrenia.

Quote:All that is going to do is make the person hate themselves even more and make them more likely to kill themselves, just like when they used to "treat" gay people back when it was considered a mental illness.

Quote:Wednesday, Texas, along with many other red states, filed a lawsuit against the federal government for sending out a letter reminding schools that adherence to federal anti-discrimination laws requires respecting transgender students and letting them have equal access to facilities.

As Zack Ford of Think Progress explains, the premise of the lawsuit is flimsy even by the low standards of right-wing hysterics. It’s based on two premises that are flat-out false: That the federal government is requiring schools to “open all school bathrooms to people of both sexes” and an implicit denial that transgender people even exist.

The lawsuit is strange and flimsy, but that might be beside the point. Transgender people have been around since forever and plenty of state and local governments have been practicing non-discrimination with nary a peep of a problem. And yet, seemingly overnight, all of a sudden every Christian conservative in the nation decided, out of the blue, that the threat of trans people in the bathrooms was our country’s greatest crisis.

The likeliest explanation for what’s going on, then, is that this panic about transgender students is a transparent election year stunt designed to rile up evangelical voters and get them to the polls in November.

With Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, fears that many conservative voters might not even bother to get to the polls this year are sky high. Already some polls are showing that Trump could  have a negative impact on down ticket races for Republicans. Desperate conservative bloggers are begging their people to suck up their distaste for Trump and vote anyway, to preserve the power of congressional, state, and local Republicans.

Under the circumstances, a little sex-and-gender panic starts to feel like just the ticket to get Christian conservatives to hold their nose and vote this year. The whole implication of this panic is that Barack Obama, and therefore Hillary Clinton, are going to turn your kids into a bunch of queers and weirdoes and the only way to stop them is voting Republican. The fact that the Democratic candidate has a shot at being the first female president only makes the issue of people supposedly doing the “wrong” thing for their gender all the more salient to conservatives.

If this theory sounds paranoid, consider that this is exactly the strategy that Republicans used in 2004 to push George W. Bush over the top in a close race with John Kerry.

In 2004, Republicans came out hard against same-sex marriage. Under Karl Rove’s guidance, Republicans from the White House down made opposition to gay marriage a centerpiece of the campaign. Eleven states had ballot measures passing constitutional bans on same-sex marriage.

Most notable among these was Ohio, a swing state where presidential polls were nail-biters until the very end, when the state tipped red, handing the election to Bush with 130,000 vote lead. Post-election analysis showed that same-sex marriage was the tie-breaker in the state. The fear of having to see the “wrong” kinds of couples get married got out the evangelical vote. Without the hysteria over gay marriage, we almost certainly would have had a President Kerry. Which would, in turn, mean that instead of John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court, we would have two more liberals, creating a majority.

After you recover from crying over what might have been, consider how quickly the issue of same-sex marriage turned around after that. After the initial “ick” reaction drove people to the polls to vote against it, the nation quickly began to realize that, upon second thought, it is not a big deal if two dudes want to marry each other. Within 11 years, the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, with one of the conservatives voting for it.

But it didn’t really matter to the right, because the stupid panic over same-sex marriage had done its dirty work, preserving conservative hold on power for another decade and handing control of the courts to the right.

Which is why, I suspect, they are running the same script on transgender people and bathrooms. It has all the same markers of the opposition to same-sex marriage: Half-baked arguments, squabbling over definitions (conservatives would often flatly declare that marriage, by definition, has to be man-woman marriage), feigned concern for “the children” and, above all other things, trying to override people’s logical faculties by speaking in hyperbolic terms designed to elicit disgust reactions.

This lawsuit is almost hilariously flimsy, or would be, if it weren’t so hateful. The claim that the feds are demanding an end to sex-segregated bathrooms is laughably easy to disprove. As the letter sent by the Department of Education clearly lays out, “Title IX’s implementing regulations permit a school to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, and athletic teams, as well as single-sex classes under certain circumstances.”

No one is saying, in other words, that boys should be allowed in the girls room. The DOE is simply saying that all girls, both trans and cis, should be allowed in the girls room. This is not as confusing as conservatives pretend it is.

In order to get around this problem, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has decided to pretend that transgender people don’t exist. He never uses the term “transgender” once, except when quoting others, in the suit. During the press conference, when he was asked if he accepted that trans people exist, he dodged. It’s clear that Paxton is playing off right-wing bigots who claim that trans people are just play-acting as the opposite gender.

But that claim doesn’t pass even a moment’s muster. Consider how Mike Huckabee tried to frame this issue last year, saying, “Now I wish somebody had told me when I was in high school, that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in P.E. I’m pretty sure I would’ve found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’”

So Huckabee and the state of Texas  are seriously trying to argue that young men, in high school of all places, are going to get up in front of a roomful of their peers and claim that they are “actually” female, just to get a peek at some boobies? Have they met any teenagers? They sure as hell don’t remember being teenagers, if they think there’s a cisgender boy alive who would endure the teasing he would get for pretending to be female because he’s so hard up on the dating market (and apparently devoid of an internet connection) that he has no hope of seeing boobies naked otherwise.

Just as with the same-sex marriage issue, once people have a chance to really think this through and learn a little more about the issue, they’ll realize that accepting trans people in bathrooms and locker rooms is really no big deal. In fact, most of us have already done so, whether we knew it or not, because most of us don’t exactly go out of our way to either show off our naked bodies or gape at others in those spaces.

But to Republicans, it hardly matters that they will lose on this issue. The only thing that matters is stoking a short-lived panic that will carry them through this election and blunt the impact of a Trump run on their polls. If the whole thing falls apart like the same-sex marriage thing did, so be it. It served its purpose. And that trans kids, actual living people who need support, are suffering because of this, clearly doesn’t matter one bit to them.

(05-28-2016, 10:03 AM)Odin Wrote: Trans exploitation in Texas: The right’s flimsy panic sure is conveniently timed for the election. This conservative freakout is a lot like the same-sex marriage panic of '04: A gambit to shore up the GOP in 2016.

Quote:Wednesday, Texas, along with many other red states, filed a lawsuit against the federal government for sending out a letter reminding schools that adherence to federal anti-discrimination laws requires respecting transgender students and letting them have equal access to facilities.

As Zack Ford of Think Progress explains, the premise of the lawsuit is flimsy even by the low standards of right-wing hysterics. It’s based on two premises that are flat-out false: That the federal government is requiring schools to “open all school bathrooms to people of both sexes” and an implicit denial that transgender people even exist.

The lawsuit is strange and flimsy, but that might be beside the point. Transgender people have been around since forever and plenty of state and local governments have been practicing non-discrimination with nary a peep of a problem. And yet, seemingly overnight, all of a sudden every Christian conservative in the nation decided, out of the blue, that the threat of trans people in the bathrooms was our country’s greatest crisis.

The likeliest explanation for what’s going on, then, is that this panic about transgender students is a transparent election year stunt designed to rile up evangelical voters and get them to the polls in November.

With Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, fears that many conservative voters might not even bother to get to the polls this year are sky high. Already some polls are showing that Trump could  have a negative impact on down ticket races for Republicans. Desperate conservative bloggers are begging their people to suck up their distaste for Trump and vote anyway, to preserve the power of congressional, state, and local Republicans.

Under the circumstances, a little sex-and-gender panic starts to feel like just the ticket to get Christian conservatives to hold their nose and vote this year. The whole implication of this panic is that Barack Obama, and therefore Hillary Clinton, are going to turn your kids into a bunch of queers and weirdoes and the only way to stop them is voting Republican. The fact that the Democratic candidate has a shot at being the first female president only makes the issue of people supposedly doing the “wrong” thing for their gender all the more salient to conservatives.

If this theory sounds paranoid, consider that this is exactly the strategy that Republicans used in 2004 to push George W. Bush over the top in a close race with John Kerry.

In 2004, Republicans came out hard against same-sex marriage. Under Karl Rove’s guidance, Republicans from the White House down made opposition to gay marriage a centerpiece of the campaign. Eleven states had ballot measures passing constitutional bans on same-sex marriage.

Most notable among these was Ohio, a swing state where presidential polls were nail-biters until the very end, when the state tipped red, handing the election to Bush with 130,000 vote lead. Post-election analysis showed that same-sex marriage was the tie-breaker in the state. The fear of having to see the “wrong” kinds of couples get married got out the evangelical vote. Without the hysteria over gay marriage, we almost certainly would have had a President Kerry. Which would, in turn, mean that instead of John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court, we would have two more liberals, creating a majority.

After you recover from crying over what might have been, consider how quickly the issue of same-sex marriage turned around after that. After the initial “ick” reaction drove people to the polls to vote against it, the nation quickly began to realize that, upon second thought, it is not a big deal if two dudes want to marry each other. Within 11 years, the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, with one of the conservatives voting for it.

But it didn’t really matter to the right, because the stupid panic over same-sex marriage had done its dirty work, preserving conservative hold on power for another decade and handing control of the courts to the right.

Which is why, I suspect, they are running the same script on transgender people and bathrooms. It has all the same markers of the opposition to same-sex marriage: Half-baked arguments, squabbling over definitions (conservatives would often flatly declare that marriage, by definition, has to be man-woman marriage), feigned concern for “the children” and, above all other things, trying to override people’s logical faculties by speaking in hyperbolic terms designed to elicit disgust reactions.

This lawsuit is almost hilariously flimsy, or would be, if it weren’t so hateful. The claim that the feds are demanding an end to sex-segregated bathrooms is laughably easy to disprove. As the letter sent by the Department of Education clearly lays out, “Title IX’s implementing regulations permit a school to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, and athletic teams, as well as single-sex classes under certain circumstances.”

No one is saying, in other words, that boys should be allowed in the girls room. The DOE is simply saying that all girls, both trans and cis, should be allowed in the girls room. This is not as confusing as conservatives pretend it is.

In order to get around this problem, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has decided to pretend that transgender people don’t exist. He never uses the term “transgender” once, except when quoting others, in the suit. During the press conference, when he was asked if he accepted that trans people exist, he dodged. It’s clear that Paxton is playing off right-wing bigots who claim that trans people are just play-acting as the opposite gender.

But that claim doesn’t pass even a moment’s muster. Consider how Mike Huckabee tried to frame this issue last year, saying, “Now I wish somebody had told me when I was in high school, that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in P.E. I’m pretty sure I would’ve found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’”

So Huckabee and the state of Texas  are seriously trying to argue that young men, in high school of all places, are going to get up in front of a roomful of their peers and claim that they are “actually” female, just to get a peek at some boobies? Have they met any teenagers? They sure as hell don’t remember being teenagers, if they think there’s a cisgender boy alive who would endure the teasing he would get for pretending to be female because he’s so hard up on the dating market (and apparently devoid of an internet connection) that he has no hope of seeing boobies naked otherwise.

Just as with the same-sex marriage issue, once people have a chance to really think this through and learn a little more about the issue, they’ll realize that accepting trans people in bathrooms and locker rooms is really no big deal. In fact, most of us have already done so, whether we knew it or not, because most of us don’t exactly go out of our way to either show off our naked bodies or gape at others in those spaces.

But to Republicans, it hardly matters that they will lose on this issue. The only thing that matters is stoking a short-lived panic that will carry them through this election and blunt the impact of a Trump run on their polls. If the whole thing falls apart like the same-sex marriage thing did, so be it. It served its purpose. And that trans kids, actual living people who need support, are suffering because of this, clearly doesn’t matter one bit to them.

(05-28-2016, 10:53 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: Given the source is Salon it is dubious at best.

(05-28-2016, 05:40 PM)Odin Wrote:

(05-28-2016, 10:53 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: Given the source is Salon it is dubious at best.

Says a guy who thinks Breitbart and alt-right YouTubers are reasonable sources...

If I was using HuffPo or Counterpunch as a source you might have a point.

(06-01-2016, 07:14 PM)Odin Wrote: Study Suggests Anti-Trans Parents May Literally Be Killing Their Kids

(06-06-2016, 03:26 PM)Anthony Wrote: What everybody - at least, almost everybody - doesn't get is that cultural conservatism is being redefined: No longer does it mean wanting to crack down on fornication, promiscuity, homosexuality etc.; instead it now means - or is very soon about to mean - preserving the Anglo-American character of the culture, by restricting, totally banning, or even reversing immigration, and demanding total assimilation from those immigrants who are permitted to come here, or to stay.

Toward this end, look for the "Trumpites" to push for the passage of a law making English the sole official language of the United States.  Good legal arguments can be offered either way as to whether such a bill, passed by Congress and signed by a President Trump, would pass constitutional muster - but the judicial branch, ultimately a SCOTUS that includes at least one Trump appointee, will decide that issue; and if the decision goes against the "Trumpites," they will no doubt proceed with a constitutional amendment.

Against this backdrop, the Transgender Wars will be the last battle of its kind - to be decided, rather obviously, in favor of the gender-benders.

(06-01-2016, 10:03 PM)taramarie Wrote: In other words what i have been saying...unisex toilets. We use them already.

(06-10-2016, 06:35 AM)Anthony Wrote: But back narrowly on topic:

Under British common law - which forms the basis for the penal codes in every U.S. state except Louisiana - the crime of burglary entails entering upon a premises on which a person has no legal right to be, with the intention of committing a crime.  Picking a lock, smashing a window, etc., is not necessary.

Quote:With the foregoing in mind, if it is illegal for a biologically-born male to be in a women's rest room, if that male commits even a relatively minor "sex crime," i.e., peeping or flashing, it becomes a felony - burglary.  But, as a practical matter, no transgender would ever be arrested for merely being in the ladies' room, unless one of the ladies commits the crime of peeping herself; otherwise, how would she know that someone was not a "real" woman?  And since taking a piss or a crap in a facility designed for same is (obviously) not a crime, the intention-of-committing-a-crime criterion for burglary is not met if that is all the transgender does in there.

Quote:So what's the fuss - unless the libs don't want to see bathroom pervs charged with burglary, which might very well provide an added deterrent to such activity?