Anybody who conflates human rights as "politics" are someone I simply cannot respect
A persons right to exist is not political
(This isn't a dig at OP but it's worth restating)
A persons right to exist is not political
(This isn't a dig at OP but it's worth restating)
It is, both in the literal sense of political as “relating to government or public affairs”, and also quite often in the frequently used sense of “controversial between political parties or factions”.
The fact that your political view is that it should not be political (in presumably the latter sense) does not change the fact that it often factually is.
I don't think anyone disagrees with that, I think the disagreement comes from the way that activists insist that the best solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc] is to "socially and heavy handedly force everyone to complete the illusion by treating transgender individuals as indistinguishable from their biological counterparts in every way". That's not the only solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc], just the current (and perhaps uniquely) American one, and it comes with a variety of problems the obvious of which stem from significant biological factors that make the illusion impossible to complete (sports, etc).
Just going to keep pointing out that human beings have very little sexual dimorphism compared to the other great apes, and that any difference is any sport that does not actually employ the genitals is probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors.
I'm not really going to defend the other side here because sports are (by definition) fundamentally arbitrary, but is this really borne out by reality? To use an easy comparison, elite adult womens' track and field athletes might be competitive against high school boys, but not at any higher level. Compare, for example, the international womens' records [0] to the records from this random high school nationals track meet [1]. What food access and/or training advantage are high school kids going to have over the most capable athletes in their sport?
[0] https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/womens-world-records/
The unequal distribution of height and muscle mass is part of sexual dimorphism.
> no obvious biological reason to simply assume that two adult peers that had the same dietary and exercise and skills training regimes would have vastly different athletic performance characteristics
Imagine you convinced someone this was true. They could say trans women should be banned from women's sports because boys receive superior training.
The effects of hormones are not assumptions.
What is your explanation for trans men gaining athletic advantages and trans women losing athletic advantages during transition?
No, it’s potential evidence for sexual dimorphism. It’s also potential evidence for systemic dietary sexism. You’d need to establish that the latter doesn’t exist to establish that the former does.
> Imagine you convinced someone this was true. They could say trans women should be banned from women's sports because boys receive superior training.
At that point we’d have shown that sexual dimorphism was not at play and that gendered sports were inherently discriminatory, so that hypothetical person would now be an idiot arguing against reality. The obvious solution would be to redirect better training at the now know equally capable athletes.
> The effects of hormones are not assumptions.
Actually they largely are… we really don’t have more than minimal and crude knowledge of precisely how hormones work or what their actual effects are.
Citation definitely needed. The gap is large, and consistent, across different nations and sports.
We would not have this in the year 2024 otherwise: https://boysvswomen.com/
In other words the (very circular reasoning) chart your source provides doesn’t obviously show sexual dimorphism when confounding variables of food and training (and the funding and social incentives that provide both) exist.
For an example of results see https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/11/586. A lot of the papers I see trying to support the opposing views try to use data of cis men which have not undergone hormone therapy to stand-in for trans women as if there was no difference but again it's quite apparent that this is not the case.
For many other areas, often people will use one incident to collectively label an entire group as deviant. This happened the same way with gay rights over the years and I've got many friends who got labelled all sorts of things because of it. As far as that's concerned, people love to arm-chair what is and isn't an effective course. None of these things are new, just American, or ignoring biological factors but it seems like those who would like to restrict acceptance of transgender people like to paint it as such.
Many of my friends have taught me a lot just by being bold enough to be seen as themselves. I don't think it's actually unreasonable to extend the benefit of the doubt to how trans people choose to affirm themselves.
Here we see that the term 'illusion' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the background, and implies some kind of bias or preconceived notion of "real" vs "fake" or "imaginary". If this is what you get from advocates and activists, then I think you either receive this through a filter of some kind, or carry said filter within.
>That's not the only solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc], just the current (and perhaps uniquely) American one, and it comes with a variety of problems the obvious of which stem from significant biological factors that make the illusion impossible to complete (sports, etc).
This is the treatment method that has consistently demonstrated the best outcomes for the people concerned over time. It is not uniquely American, as it was pioneered in Europe before taken to the next level in the US, among other countries/regions. Again, furtherance of the idea there is an 'illusion that must be completed'. This is not the case. Trans people are very aware just how much they do or do not fit in compared to the average population at large. No one needs to point this out to them, nor does anyone need to coddle them. By far, just being treated as how one wishes to be treated goes a long, long way.
In regards to sports, if the person in question has medically transitioned and has done so with HRT for some year(s) (I think 2 is the baseline minimum from studies?), then their overall performance in sports will be measurably less then their peers of the same gender in most instances. The few that excel are not statistically more significant than the few natural athletes who excel due to some developmental advantage (larger heart/lung capacity, etc) due to early or sustained training, genetic factors, etc. At least this is what the preliminary data is showing us so far. On average, the distribution remains about the same and on par with other athletes. This is almost always a talking point/dog whistle that is, once you peel the onion, much ado about nothing. Just like most all other contentious talking points about transgender folks, which do not vary significantly from the same points about gay rights, marriage equality, racial segregation/integration debates, or equality in voting and women's rights, etc, etc.
I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.
Some people however strive to "live above" politics, or to breathlessly demand things be "apolitical" based on their own biases. That bias in of itself being as "political" as anything else
It is, example?
Nord Korea signed it, the US and Canada just ratified it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...
Canada ratified it years ago (if we're not counting optional protocols), but according to https://indicators.ohchr.org/, the US hasn't. Do you have a source?
I cannot believe this. Simply outrageous. I never understood the religious people before - to me this is a sacrilege.
Universal human rights are the hill I will literally die on.
I hope my extreme summarization is not completely useless.
https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-191-tran... // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiE5rBLrIgM
Second: the biggest straw man I have ever seen. Rage bait Philosophy.Just because human rights are violated does not mean, that they are useless or non existence.
It's a good word of caution specially the normalizing states of emergency and dehumanizing people.
Civil libertys and democracy are fragile achievements, that need to be protected by the citizens. Human rights are rights against an overbearing state.
All the examples given are valid points, that violate human rights. And for every issue there is a human right group, that fights against the violations.
I dont buy his conclusion about potential either... Another magical force.
Regarding organisations and corporations he should really read up on Luhmann.
So maybe I am a fanatic - none of his arguments strike true for me.
Thanks for exposing me to this ideas!
Oh, here's one more video on human rights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q (by Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy, a collectivist/Marxist?)
I don't think anyone is saying anyone else should not exist.
The Alan Turing comparison springs to mind.
This means that which ethical framework we as a society use to decide what counts as a human right is an inherently political question: it's a decision that we try to make as a society in as nonviolent a manner as possible.
And before we get too far off the deep end, I want to note that both sides of the aisle firmly believe that the other side ignores fundamental human rights that their side respects. This is what happens when good people operate with completely opposite ethical frameworks, and we won't get anywhere by just shouting that our framework is the only valid one.
And, gender aside, the most important thing to consider is the existence of intersex people, the diaspora of their bodies, and to consider how you think we should talk about them. Sex is, even outside gender, in fact not immutable. It's biology. These people are also historically denigrated.
Please imagine how ~150 years ago we collectively thought (and some people still think) that a person's race determined their intelligence. Historically "fundamental truths" usually end up with people being thought of as subhuman. The "fundamental truth" of sex, as it's presented by those who consider trans folks not people, is the same sort of truth. Biological sex is a spectrum, demonstrably. Gender is also demonstrably a spectrum. I don't care what people believe sex is or isn't. I care that we treat everyone, no matter how "weird" with respect.
You could argue though that it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society. In some other country, society might collectively decide not to accommodate said wishes and instead treat sex and gender as immutable and indistinguishable. Such a course would result in a simpler classification system: XX = female, XY = male, anything else = unclassified (genetic defect handled on a case-by-case basis).
> a simpler classification system: XX = female, XY = male
This would, as with all other such systems that refer to X/Y chromosomes, be invalidated immediately upon contact with reality. I estimate that a couple million people worldwide have one set of fertile reproductive organs that do not match the binary view described – that is: men without, and women with, a Y chromosome.
> it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society
None of these people selected a "preference" at birth, and may go their entire lives and have children without ever realizing that their chromosomes and their reproductive organs do not match the XX/XY binary you've presented.
> anything else = unclassified (genetic defect handled on a case-by-case basis)
This would mislabel XXX, XXY, XYY people as "defects" for genetic circumstances that do not necessarily have any visible presentation, that people may not be aware of at all.
It also mislabel some, but not all, intersex people as "defects". Intersex people span the entire spectrum of known chromosome combinations in human beings: Human bodies produce one or more sets of (often) fertile reproductive equipment regardless of what chromosomes are or are not present.
Ironically, then, focusing on XX/XY classifications while disregarding the realities of human biology always results in an invalid classification system that is more likely to harm cis people than intersex people.
There are a a few pretty big upsides I can think of to using a simpler social gender classification system: less social friction/discord/controversy (too much of this and your country falls apart and everyone is worse off), less social confusion/cognitive burden (pronouns, as one example, have basically become a third name that you have to memorize in addition to first and and secondary names whereas they used to just be a derived property that you didn't have to memorize).
This system can break down for some trans people (although I bet most make excessive effort to present as their preferred gender), but it also breaks down for effeminate males and masculine women (and I bet this is the larger category). Despite these difficulties, it's worked for literally all of history until people started pretending they don't know how pronouns work. Test it yourself by taking a look at Lynn's picture and asking which pronouns you'd use.
I'm not sure how invoking genetics simplifies anything. Have you had your sex chromosomes checked? I haven't, and triple-X and KS are often undiagnosed! I'd hate to have to update my drivers license to "unclassified" in my 30s.
I actually don't really care too much which classification system is used (chromosomes vs. observable genitalia at birth vs. something else), I just think the pros of collectively treating certain aspects of identity as immutable such as gender, race, and possibly even name, outweigh the cons of making a tiny fraction of the populace slightly more uncomfortable.
I'll be honest. I'm confused.
But to directly address your point... the main difference here is that "dead names" and "dead pronouns" are considered harmful and/or offensive and are therefore actively hunted and scrubbed from history by activists, unlike maiden names which are considered benign.
Evidence and data seems to support this as we learn and discover more.
It's not the mere existence of a person that's an issue, but rather the coercive, punishing activism that takes place around a false idea that human rights are at risk, while these personal choices are simultaneously being celebrated by nearly every government institution and major corporation in existence.
The same activism requires full acceptance by parents, families, and children who do not want these choices influencing their personal lives.
To say these rights are at risk is an outright lie.
It's one thing to have a significant voter base opposed to those choices and still be fully able to live and express those choices freely and publicly — while it's a whole different issue to have governments actively enforcing a different private life against their will (specifically LGBTQ folks).
(Edits: re-word for clarification)
1) Nowhere, in history, does "government actively enforcing a different private life against one's will" mean "you are forced to live or participate in a transgender life". For the entirety of history government and corporations have actively forced "different" people like Lynn to conform to your expectations of them. See Lynn being fired from IBM.
2) "To say they are at risk is an outright lie". The rhetoric and social norms around the existence of transgender people enables violent people to murder them. They are absolutely actively at risk. What other phrase, besides "at risk", would you use to explain that transgender people are 4 times more likely to be murdered. They are literally killed for being different and because we dehumanize them.
I look forward to the day that what you say is true. That there are people who oppose those choices but that transgender people can live a free and public life without being murdered for being themselves. I think what you're putting forward sounds great.
This is very incorrect, and an indicator that you should broaden the sources you get information from. Your other comments corroborate this, you have skewed view of the world that is based on looking at a small slice. It's not that they're fabricating things, it's that they do not give you an accurate view of the magnitudes of the forces and movements in the world.
There are however a bunch of things which is political like: Laws governing universal health care, laws governing minors rights to make decisions as minors, laws that makes distinctions between genders, cultural norms around bathrooms (which is mostly a stupid cost-cutting measure), and norms around cultural sports (which are fairly arbitrary).
Out of those, the first two should likely remain being political, while the two last ones should be resolved, and the middle one should just not exist.