Trans people force other people into hard decisions/choices/situations constantly, so I understand why it's so controversial compared to something as harmless as gay marriage


eg

A girl who doesn't know how to handle the man in her female-only dorm room

A girl losing the state championship to a former-male in the 100m dash

A man who matched with a woman on a dating app who was previously a man and didn't share this information in a timely way

etc

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP here. My dd is a freshman and her roommate is transgender (born female, now a male). While my dd has zero issue with someone being transgender, it has been an adjustment and not at all what she expected for a roommate situation. She won’t request a change for fear of seeming discriminatory, but she’s not fully comfortable living with a guy. I feel that colleges still have work to do in this area in making sure that everyone feels comfortable with their living situation.

I believe this is a troll post.

None of the colleges my kid's looked at allowed co-ed dorm rooms. Co-ed dorm floors, yes, but not rooms. Transgender housing was even discussed and addressed in that the student will reside in the dorm for which they currently identify.

This is the pp again. I wish I was making this up. As I stated before, this college offers gender neutral housing. However, they do not have the authority to insist that someone live in gender neutral housing as opposed to housing with their birth gender and (I assume, but could be incorrect) biological parts. I don’t know why this student chose a female room assignment instead of gender neutral housing, but I can assume it is their right to do so. It is not up to the college to decide who is what gender and what they are comfortable with. My dd and her roommate are friendly with each other, but not quite friends and have not discussed gender identity. She has acknowledged that this is her roommate and she is going to make it work.

Perhaps the student didn't fully understand the gender neutral housing option, or made the decision to live as a man too late to request it. If his transition is relatively new, I can certainly see why he would feel safer rooming with an unknown female than with an unknown male. I'm glad that your daughter is friendly and intends to make the situation work, but I hope that they can work to discuss gender identity together and get to know and understand each other's concerns. My suggestion for your daughter is to consider the situation like rooming with a male cousin on a family vacation. Take the time to discuss changing and shower etiquette in advance, and just be upfront about any other specific concerns.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's definitely a trend. It's being promoted heavily by the powerful gay lobby, which lost its major fundraising hook when the Supreme Court approved gay marriage.

There is little scientific evidence to support the idea that humans can change genders but whatever....

Since you love evidence so much, please provide proof that it's being promoted by the gay lobby?
I think the current prevalence of this is that it's just trendy, like tattoos were or lipstick lesbianism was when I was in college.

Are these Russian troll posts? Are the Russians trying to divide Americans by suggesting the "gay lobby" is "promoting" transgender identity?

Nice try, Boris.

Anonymous wrote:Being transgender isn’t a trend.

Recognizing that trans people deserve the same respect afforded to others might be new to you, but it’s natural to most of us.

I have a close friend who is transgender. My child's best friend is transgender. Two kids at my child's school are transgender. I wonder how many other trans folk are hiding still, which is sad.

My friend who is in his 50s, knew when he was a child that he'd been born into the wrong gender. He's a totally normal human being, smart, funny, accomplished, exactly the same person he was when he was forced to wear female clothing even though he felt in his soul for all of his childhood that he was a man. Luckily, he's a strong person, so he came out in his 20s and has been living very happily as the man he really is.

I think the "trend" is that people like my friend are no longer forced to hide their true gender identities. There really are not a lot of transgender people, it's just that we didn't see them because they were so afraid to reveal themselves. Bravo that they can come out of hiding now!

Anonymous wrote:

Being non-binary and gender fluid is not rare, and these people consider themselves to be transgender.

Yes, it is rare. The LGBT community is only about 4.5% of the population, according to Gallup (2017). Only about 0.6% of the population are transgender. That is a very small percentage of the population.

But what about the percentage of the teen and college-aged population. Especially in communities where these behaviors are vigorously promoted, like nw dc?

Anonymous wrote:It's definitely a trend. It's being promoted heavily by the powerful gay lobby, which lost its major fundraising hook when the Supreme Court approved gay marriage.

There is little scientific evidence to support the idea that humans can change genders but whatever....

Since you love evidence so much, please provide proof that it's being promoted by the gay lobby?
I think the current prevalence of this is that it's just trendy, like tattoos were or lipstick lesbianism was when I was in college.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP here. My dd is a freshman and her roommate is transgender (born female, now a male). While my dd has zero issue with someone being transgender, it has been an adjustment and not at all what she expected for a roommate situation. She won’t request a change for fear of seeming discriminatory, but she’s not fully comfortable living with a guy. I feel that colleges still have work to do in this area in making sure that everyone feels comfortable with their living situation.

I believe this is a troll post.

None of the colleges my kid's looked at allowed co-ed dorm rooms. Co-ed dorm floors, yes, but not rooms. Transgender housing was even discussed and addressed in that the student will reside in the dorm for which they currently identify.

This is the pp again. I wish I was making this up. As I stated before, this college offers gender neutral housing. However, they do not have the authority to insist that someone live in gender neutral housing as opposed to housing with their birth gender and (I assume, but could be incorrect) biological parts. I don’t know why this student chose a female room assignment instead of gender neutral housing, but I can assume it is their right to do so. It is not up to the college to decide who is what gender and what they are comfortable with. My dd and her roommate are friendly with each other, but not quite friends and have not discussed gender identity. She has acknowledged that this is her roommate and she is going to make it work.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP here. My dd is a freshman and her roommate is transgender (born female, now a male). While my dd has zero issue with someone being transgender, it has been an adjustment and not at all what she expected for a roommate situation. She won’t request a change for fear of seeming discriminatory, but she’s not fully comfortable living with a guy. I feel that colleges still have work to do in this area in making sure that everyone feels comfortable with their living situation.

I believe this is a troll post.

None of the colleges my kid's looked at allowed co-ed dorm rooms. Co-ed dorm floors, yes, but not rooms. Transgender housing was even discussed and addressed in that the student will reside in the dorm for which they currently identify.

Except if you read, the person said all the student's college information was the biological information. It's possible the student didn't tell the college. It's possible the student transitioned just before arriving on, or upon arrival at campus.

Anonymous wrote:It seemed pretty thoughtful to me that my DC's freshman dorm had name signs on the rooms that included a line for students to express their pronoun preferences. I'll admit to not giving it much thought, but it seemed a very kind thing to do. And I don't think it is possible to ever be too kind.

I am fascinated by how fragile some people are about their own sexuality. To use a phrase like "transgender craze" is pretty bizarre and indicates some sort of personal threat the writer feels from other people's identities. No one chooses to be trans. I have never wondered if I was born the wrong gender, but I can certainly empathize with how difficult it must be for those that do. Nobody should contemplate suicide because they are transgender, but a large proportion do.

Why would treating a transgender person with dignity and respect, just like everyone else, ever be problematic? My guess is that those who are so troubled with the mere existence of transgender folks do so because they are so insecure about what it means to be male or female. When your gender identity is about performing a role rather than just being yourself, policing the lines becomes really important to preserving your self image. I guess in some ways its sort of sad and deserves a little sympathy too. But, when it crosses the line to denigrating others and belittling other people's basic needs, my sympathy evaporates.

You're stopping at calling them the name and pronouns they prefer though. And if that's where it stopped, I bet very few people would have issues.
It doesn't stop there.

There are biological boys in Connecticut who are competing as girls, in girls HS events. These biological boys are not taking any drugs to minimize male puberty, and because of that are effectively on performance enhancing drugs. Should the biological girls they are competing against take testosterone in order to try to regain the even playing field they had before these biological boys decided that not only did they want to be girls socially, but they wanted to be girls athletically (without reducing their biological advantage)?
There are male bodied predators in California who have harassed homeless women in shelters, and the homeless women have no recourse because CA is following the "self-id" regulation. If the women complain, they are told to not be bigots. Not to be bigots in the face of being sexually threatened. There are trans people offering to help identify who is "real trans" and who isn't, in this case. Which blows my mind, because the shelter is in this predicament because of trans lobbying that self-id is all that's necessary. And people had sympathy for them. And even when some people talked about the what-ifs, and how we could protect vulnerable women, they just get "vulnerable trans! suicide!" thrown in their face. Which does not, in any way, lead to a solution for all the vulnerable populations. And it is, unfortunately, very much the way men try to shout and shut women down constantly.

I can have sympathy for people and it doesn't require I believe everything they do and say is above reproach.

Anonymous wrote:
"Transgender women tend to have brain structures that resemble cisgender women, rather than cisgender men....In 1995 and 2000, two independent teams of researchers decided to examine a region of the brain called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) in trans- and cisgender men and women... Interestingly, both teams discovered that male-to-female transgender women had a BSTc more closely resembling that of cisgender women than men in both size and cell density, and that female-to-male transgender men had BSTcs resembling cisgender men."

So we're back to boy brains and girl brains again. Even though we have mountains of science which show us that differences in brain structure across each sex are greater than the differences between sexes. And when the studies account for sexual orientation, we see some difference, although we don't know if that difference comes from life (e.g. the way UK cab drivers brains are different) or birth.

And rather than interrogate it, we'll just easily fall back into "girl brains!" even though we have a long history of women being discriminated against and treated terribly for their biology, which should make us very skeptical of any "girl brains!" claim, just as we should be skeptical of any claims about long-discriminated against groups and biological basis for that discrimination.

Anonymous wrote:NP here. My dd is a freshman and her roommate is transgender (born female, now a male). While my dd has zero issue with someone being transgender, it has been an adjustment and not at all what she expected for a roommate situation. She won’t request a change for fear of seeming discriminatory, but she’s not fully comfortable living with a guy. I feel that colleges still have work to do in this area in making sure that everyone feels comfortable with their living situation.

I believe this is a troll post.

None of the colleges my kid's looked at allowed co-ed dorm rooms. Co-ed dorm floors, yes, but not rooms. Transgender housing was even discussed and addressed in that the student will reside in the dorm for which they currently identify.

It seemed pretty thoughtful to me that my DC's freshman dorm had name signs on the rooms that included a line for students to express their pronoun preferences. I'll admit to not giving it much thought, but it seemed a very kind thing to do. And I don't think it is possible to ever be too kind.

I am fascinated by how fragile some people are about their own sexuality. To use a phrase like "transgender craze" is pretty bizarre and indicates some sort of personal threat the writer feels from other people's identities. No one chooses to be trans. I have never wondered if I was born the wrong gender, but I can certainly empathize with how difficult it must be for those that do. Nobody should contemplate suicide because they are transgender, but a large proportion do.

Why would treating a transgender person with dignity and respect, just like everyone else, ever be problematic? My guess is that those who are so troubled with the mere existence of transgender folks do so because they are so insecure about what it means to be male or female. When your gender identity is about performing a role rather than just being yourself, policing the lines becomes really important to preserving your self image. I guess in some ways its sort of sad and deserves a little sympathy too. But, when it crosses the line to denigrating others and belittling other people's basic needs, my sympathy evaporates.

Anonymous wrote:It's definitely a trend. It's being promoted heavily by the powerful gay lobby, which lost its major fundraising hook when the Supreme Court approved gay marriage.

There is little scientific evidence to support the idea that humans can change genders but whatever....

Gay rights advocacy groups don't advocate for people to be gay or trans. They advocate for gay and trans people to be treated as people and accorded the same civil rights that straight and cisgender people take for granted. This is not complicated.

Trans acceptance/civil rights advocacy is not about people "changing genders." It's about allowing people to be who they are.

There is a mountain of scientific evidence that gender is complex and not binary, and this is not a particularly new development. Here's a simple blog post explaining some of research into the the biology of transgenderism. http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/gender-lines-science-transgender-identity/

Notable points include:

"Transgender women tend to have brain structures that resemble cisgender women, rather than cisgender men....In 1995 and 2000, two independent teams of researchers decided to examine a region of the brain called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) in trans- and cisgender men and women... Interestingly, both teams discovered that male-to-female transgender women had a BSTc more closely resembling that of cisgender women than men in both size and cell density, and that female-to-male transgender men had BSTcs resembling cisgender men."

"Science tells us that gender is certainly not binary; it may not even be a linear spectrum. Like many other facets of identity, it can operate on a broad range of levels and operate outside of many definitions. And it also appears that gender may not be as static as we assume. At the forefront of this, transgender identity is complex – it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to attribute it to one neat, contained set of causes, and there is still much to be learned. But we know now that several of those causes are biological. These individuals are not suffering a mental illness, or capriciously “choosing” a different identity. "

There is no craze. In a school of 30K there is an LGBQT location that maybe 20-100 kids go in and out of each week. Of those maybe 2-3 of them are transgender.

The craze is the media sensation to it. Same as cops killing blacks, kids getting kidnapped, school shootings, etc...

Rarely happens but is portrayed in the news ad naseaum that it is everyone’s biggest fear.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The only hard issue in trans gender ethics is whether/how pre-adolescent children transition. Other than that MYOB.

That is one hard issue, yes.
Another hard issue is how to handle participation in sex-segregated athletics.
Another hard issue is how to handle sex-segregated scholarships or awards.
Another hard issue is how to handle admission to sex-segregated shelters or spaces for victims of domestic violence or sexual assault.

I don't think any of those other things are difficult - they're just fringe cases held up to attract attention.

They shouldn't be difficult, since clearly biological boys don't belong in biological girls sports and biological men don't belong in biological women's spaces.

But it is difficult, because as a culture we continue to disrespect women and ignore women's history and needs. And rather than talk about a complicated issue involving overlapping needs, we just expect women to sit down and shut up and defer to men.