Hacker News Reader

Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

When you talk to most cisgender people, two of the biggest transgender issues they mention are sports and bathrooms. Meanwhile when transgender people are allowed to choose what sport to compete in or what bathroom to choose, there have been very few problems from them. It seems to me that lots of people just fundamentally believe that transgender people are wrong, gross, or whatever derogatory term you want to use and they work backwards from there looking for excuses before eventually landing on sports and bathrooms.

View on HN

Have you ever been an athlete in a serious way? Honest question. If people who've competed or deeply cared about sports seem to all get hung up on this, maybe they're seeing something you're not?

Your two issues are issues because, even without any prejudice, there are physical differences that we have to handle and it's not easy to figure out how to be fair to all parties.

In the case we're talking about, for example, the trans women fractured a woman's skull. Broke her skull. Was the skull the problem here? Should it have been less breakable to match the rhetoric?

It's important to make a distinction here. One that Rogan fails to make in his comments.

Fox fractured her opponent's orbital. This is a facial fracture, not a skull fracture. Skull fractures are life threatening whereas facial fractures generally are not.

There is a large discrepancy in the force required to cause a facial vs skull fracture as well.

Yes, I have been heavily involved in high level athletics.

MMA is a violent sport. There are risks to anyone participating in it. If you are seriously worried about protecting athletes, there should be more widespread changes than just eliminating the handful of transgender athletes because I guarantee the majority of injuries occur in matches between two cisgender athletes.

What if the reality is that transgender people already have a reasonable set of rights in our society?

If the front line of the battle is people being assholes about pronouns and transgender women competing in combat sports... maybe the war is won?

I dont know, I'd say the front line of the battle is things like transgender persons having 9x the suicide rate of the general population. Is that a war that looks won to you?

Some women are uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with trans-women. Should we continue to dictate how these women should behave and feel?

We generally established that "I don't feel comfortable being around them" is not an excuse to discriminate back in the 60s.

To clarify: would you argue that the existence of separate drinking fountains for white people and black people is justified because many white people feel uncomfortable drinking from the same fountain a black person has just used? If not, why not?

Isn't this an argument that there should be no bathroom segregation whatsoever? Why should women care if men use the same bathroom as them?

Yup and gender neutral bathrooms are a thing without much ceremony in a whole bunch of places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com