GC: What would you say to someone for who considers their transition to have been a massive improvement to their life and wellbeing?

submitted by pilf from self.GCdebatesQT

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[–]Chronicity 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I wouldn’t argue them out of their position. If dressing a certain way and taking certain drugs to affect a certain appearance makes someone feel better about themselves, then cool.

If they use these feelings to justify disrespectful actions towards others, that’s where I draw the line. Female athletes shouldn’t lose titles because a transwoman feels happier playing against women than men. Women and girls shouldn’t lose a sense of safety and privacy in restrooms and locker rooms for the sake of transwomen’s feelings either. Correctly identifying a transwomen as a male and acknowledging this observation with the “wrong” pronoun shouldn’t cost someone a job or opportunity just because it upsets a transwoman.

If all we were talking about is making changes to oneself to alleviate distress, then we’d hardly have anything to debate. But obviously we are talking about more than that.

[–]pilf[S] 1 insightful - 3 fun1 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

Correctly identifying a transwomen as a male and acknowledging this observation with the “wrong” pronoun shouldn’t cost someone a job or opportunity just because it upsets a transwoman.

There a plenty of true things that a person can lose a job or opportunity for acknowledging because it upsets another person. Why should this be different?

[–]adungitit 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Well, namely, pretending that plastic surgeries and artificially induced hormonal imbalance makes someone into a woman just because they claim they have a "female brain" or "feel like women" or "because women are anything under the sun and have no meaning as a concept" is not something that feminist women should be required to partake in. It's basically telling women to play-pretend with a distinctly backwards and misogynistic ideology that has a long patriarchal history of being harmful to them (erasure of women's issues, ignorance of female biology, androcentrism, brainsex, claims of female inferiority and gender roles being innate etc.).