BATHROOM, SPORTS (etc.) POLICY REGARDING TRANSGENDER PEOPLE
The ruling class is using this issue to divide-and-rule
[The URL of this article is https://www.pdrboston.org/bathroom-policy-re-transgender ]
by John Spritzler
November, 2018 and updated subsequently
[This video (starting at time point 32:18) sheds light on why some boys/men (trans girls/women) want to use girls/women's locker and shower facilities instead of private single-person facilities]
As somebody once wisely said, "Sometimes that which goes without saying goes better said." In that spirit let me say, before getting into the topic indicated by the title of this article, that I believe that transgender people should have full civil and human rights, just like everybody else. Nothing I say below is contrary to this belief. Politicians, as we all know, sometimes claim that the law they passed or advocate is about doing something good--like defending human and civil rights or the "right to work," etc., when in reality it is no such thing. When somebody objects to such a law, that does not mean, of course, that they object to the good thing that the law PURPORTS to be defending, does it?
Until 2016, the very reasonable custom for a very long time has been that when it comes to public-access locker room and shower facilities, people with apparently only male genitalia (whether born with them or not) use one set of facilities, and people with apparently only female genitalia use a different set of facilities, and people with apparently both male and female genitalia--yes, there are a minuscule number of such people!--use a private one-person only facility. Why the word 'apparently' here? Because a minuscule number of people have non-visible genitalia of one type, possibly with visible genitalia of the other type; what's visible is what matters. This long-standing custom makes perfect sense and we should stick with it.
I would add that there should be private single-person bathrooms, shower areas and locker rooms for any individuals who for any reason do not want to use a multi-person room or area. For example, some children in middle schools or high schools are demanding to be permitted to use bathroom, locker and shower facilities assigned to girls on the grounds that they identify as female despite having male genitalia from birth (and vice versa.) Such students should be limited to either the facilities in which people have the same type of apparent genitalia as they do, or to private single-person facilities.****
As for public-access bathrooms with private stalls, the very reasonable custom has been that people who appear to be female use the women's bathroom and vice versa for the men's bathroom; genitalia are irrelevant because they are not seen by anybody else. This made virtually everybody happy, including transgender people.
Note, however, that private stalls in a bathroom do not solve the problem that Muslim girls/women who sometimes remove their hijabs in order to adjust them in front of the common area mirrors, and who do not want to do this in the presence of a male, have a reason for not wanting males in the bathroom, even if there are private stalls; if and when this is a concern then even bathrooms with a private stall should be limited to those who, as described above, are permitted to use a similarly gendered locker or shower room.
(Note: I use the words "apparently" and "appear" above because this makes for a practical policy. If the policy were based on actual (including non-visible internal organs and tissue), not just visibly apparent, male/female genitalia or biological sex this would require--absurdly in my opinion--tedious and invasive inspections.)
The rare transgender individual with one kind of genitalia who insists on using shower or locker room facilities where everybody else has the opposite kind of genitalia (such as the swimmer, Lia Thomas reported on here or these prisoners reported here) is viewed by most transgender people as wrong, as motivated by ideologically or sexually (as described in this video starting at time point 32:18 by the sexologist scientist who has studied this) driven exhibitionism that denies the right of people to the kind of privacy they are accustomed to in gendered public-access facilities.
(See footnote ***** regarding transgender people in sports.)
But now the Left/Liberal establishment is telling sensible ordinary people they are just a bunch of bigots for agreeing with the policies described above.
The Left & Big-Money-Funded Liberal Organizations are Wrong and Are Being Used by the Ruling Class to Divide and Rule Us
Some LGBT organizations allied with Big Money* (which is using this issue to divide-and-rule us) are claiming this rare kind of transgender person (who wants to use a shower area or locker room with people who have the opposite type of genitalia as him/herself) is typical of transgender people, and therefore the long standing custom for public-access bathroom, locker room and shower facilities is "oppressive to transgender people." This is a lie.**
When liberals hear NPR tell them the lie that transgender people are oppressed by the long standing custom, they reflexively support the new "bathroom" laws that liberal politicians claim are necessary to end the oppression of transgender people. These new laws, however, are terrible and have nothing to do with ending the oppression of anybody. President Obama was behind these terrible laws (he began his activism on this issue as far back as October, 2015). He insisted that any person with male genitalia (born with them or not) who says "I feel like a woman today" has a legal right to enter the public-access bathrooms, locker rooms and showers designated as for women (and vice versa), and anybody who disagrees is a bigot. Hardly any ordinary people agree with this, not even transgender persons. And yet liberal politicians are passing laws that say this.
In some states, the politicians are refusing to go along with this nonsense. This wrong-headed nonsense, in the name of ending oppression, actually causes oppression, as women prisoners in Scotland are experiencing to their horror, as claimed by a feminist organization and reported here. (Note that even if this feminist organization's claim were false--I'm not saying it is--the liberal policy would eventually make such things happen because that is the logic of the policy.)
North Carolina's new HB2 law*** (signed into law in March of 2016, in response to the liberal attack on the status quo) says that public-access bathroom, locker room and shower room facilities designated as for women are only for people whose birth certificate says they are female, and vice versa. North Carolina (like many other states) lets a person change the gender on their birth certificate by providing "a notarized statement from the physician who performed the sex reassignment surgery or from a physician licensed to practice medicine who has examined the individual and can certify that the person has undergone sex reassignment surgery."
North Carolina's HB2 law thus simply codifies what has been the perfectly reasonable custom for decades: people with male genitalia (whether born with them or not) use one set of facilities and people with female genitalia (whether born with them or not) use a different set of facilities.** HB2 is a perfectly reasonable law and in fact ordinary transgender people are fine with it too.
The liberal establishment (NPR, etc.) media don't tell their listeners/readers a very key fact: that one can change the "M" to "F" or vice versa on one's birth certificate in North Carolina (and most states). Why not? The reason is that when people don't know one can change one's birth certificate gender, then it seems as if the HB2 law requires a male-to-female transgender person with "sex-change" surgery to use the men's facilities, and vice versa, which would be oppressive. The liberal establishment media want their liberal audiences to believe that non-liberals who support the HB2 law are "transphobic" bigots; and so the liberal media censor the key fact that prevents their audience from seeing that HB2 is perfectly reasonable and not at all oppressive.
Attacking people who support HB2 as bigots is the way that the ruling class uses this manufactured issue to divide-and-rule, to pit the liberal NPR listeners against the rest of the population.
When a woman is naked in a public-access shower/locker room and a stranger enters displaying apparent male genitalia, the woman has every reason in the world to assume the stranger is a man, and she has no ability whatsoever to confirm the stranger's claim (if he or she makes it) to the contrary. The woman in this case has a perfect right to tell the stranger with apparent male genitalia he is not welcome in the women's shower/locker room.
This has nothing to do with women necessarily fearing that the man will harm her (although it is not an unreasonable fear); it's simply that she doesn't want to be naked in front of a stranger who is a man in a public-access place. The LGBT organizations lined up behind the liberal politicians are deliberately confusing the issue by asserting that a transgender person is not likely to sexually assault a woman and if they did so that is already a crime, "So what's the big deal?" These LGBT organizations say this in order to deflect attention from the actual and totally reasonable concerns that women have: they don't want to be naked in front of an unknown man in a public-access locker/shower room.
The disingenuous nature of these LGBT organizations' defense of the terrible liberal "bathroom" laws reveals how phony the entire "bathroom" issue is. The ruling class claims there is oppression where there is not oppression, in order to use divide-and-rule to implement the REAL oppression: class inequality so obscene that 3 American individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of all Americans combined.
SOME LAWS AND COURT RULINGS, ETC.
This court ruled that a person has a right to use a girls bathroom in a school merely if they say they are a girl: https://gazette.com/news/transgender-6-year-old-wins-civil-rights-case-against-fountain-school-district/article_46676c4e-077a-5867-9bf4-08c061202e1f.html
The Obama administration formally supported a transgender person's right "to use restrooms corresponding with their chosen gender identity rather than their biological sex: https://mashable.com/archive/obama-administration-transgender-lawsuit#DFYhKNg2b8qE
"In 2016, guidance was issued by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education stating that schools which receive federal money must treat a student's gender identity as their sex (for example, in regard to bathrooms).[13] However, this policy was revoked in 2017.[13]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill
"In February 2016, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, adopted an ordinance which, it said, was intended to allow transgender persons a right to access bathrooms according to gender identity.[27] The preexisting ordinance, in § 12-58 prohibited discrimination race, religion or national origin. In addition, the preexisting ordinance in § 12-59 banned discrimination based on sex but specifically exempted bathrooms, changing rooms and other intimate spaces from sex discrimination prohibitions, thus allowing separation based on sex.[28] The ordinance did not ban discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. By the February 2016 amendment, the City Council added gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and marital status to the protected categories. It also deleted this provision that allowed separation based on "sex". In so doing, it essentially eliminated the word "sex" from the city ordinance, leaving the term gender." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill
"On July 7, 2016, “An Act Relative to Transgender Anti-Discrimination” (Senate Bill 2407) was passed by a voice vote in the Senate and 117-36 in the House. It was signed by Governor of Massachusetts Charlie Baker the next day. It took effect on October 1, 2016. It amended Section 92A of chapter 272 of the General Laws to cover "gender identity" in "any place of public accommodation, resort or amusement that lawfully segregates or separates access...based on a person’s sex" such that all individuals shall be treated "consistent with the person’s gender identity."[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Gender_Identity_Anti-Discrimination_Initiative
Section 92A of chapter 272 of the General Law is online at https://malegislature.gov/laws/generallaws/partiv/titlei/chapter272/section92a .
The "Act Relative to Transgender Anti-Discrimination” (Senate Bill 2407)" is online as a downloadable PDF file available at https://malegislature.gov/Bills/189/Senate/S2407/ . It says (read it for yourself; I cannot copy and paste from the PDF file):
"An owner, lessee, proprietor, manager, superintendent, agent, or employee of any place of public accommodation, resort or amusement that lawfully segregates or separates access to such place of public accommodation, or a portion of such place of public accommodation, based on a person's sex shall grant all persons admission to, and the full enjoyment of, such place of public accommodation or portion thereof consistent with the person's gender identity....Any person who shall violate any provision of this section, or who shall aid in or incite, cause or bring about, in whole or in part, such a violation shall be punished by a fine of not more than one hundred dollars, or by imprisonment for not more than thirty days, or both."
"Boston, Human rights, chapter XII, s.12-9
Includes in its protections, "Gender identity or expression shall mean and include a person's actual or perceived gender, as well as a person's gender identity, gender-related self-image, gender-related appearance, or gender-related expression whether or not that gender identity, gender-related self-image, gender-related appearance, or gender-related expression is different from that traditionally associated with a person's sex at birth."" https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-law-about-gender-identity-or-expression
In Virginia, NBCNews reports, "Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration rewrote Virginia’s model policies for the treatment of transgender students, mandating that all students use school facilities, including bathrooms or locker rooms, according to the sex they were assigned at birth." This prompted a walkout of students in protest. This new policy ignores (perhaps deliberately in order to be maximally divisive?) the fact that some students may have had sex-change surgery (read here about the early age this may happen) in which case the the policy would require (because it says "according to the sex they were assigned at birth" instead of according to their birth certificate, which can be changed after sex-surgery) a person to use a shower area or locker room with people who have the opposite type of genitalia.
SEX VERSUS GENDER
Just because a person born biologically male decides to live life as a female (or vice versa) does not mean that this person changed their sex, only that he/she changed their social gender identity, which is different from their biological sex. Please watch this video by a transgender woman (born biologically male) explain this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyzZ3J6IG6s .
TRANS-WOMEN ARE MALES WHO SHOULD NOT BE COMPETING AGAINST FEMALES IN SPORTS
The commonly asserted trans nonsense falsely says, "trans women are women." This assertion is simply false, and repeating it as a kind of religious dogma does not make it one iota true. Biological males remain biological males no matter what hormones or surgery they have taken or been subjected to, and no matter what clothing they wear, etc.
Like all mammals, humans have evolved to reproduce sexually, by a female gamete (an egg, also called an ovum) being fertilized by a male gamete (called a sperm). There are no other gametes, only a female and a male gamete. Humans whose bodies are organized around the production of female gametes--eggs--and the nurturing of a fertilized egg till birth and then following birth with breast milk are females. Humans whose bodies are organized around the production of male gametes (sperm) and the fertilization of an egg by a sperm are males. This fundamental organization of human bodies, at the cellular level and other organ and tissue level, cannot be changed from female to male or from male to female by any known means.
(In some rare births (about 0.018%, i.e., less than 1 in 5000 births https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/ ) an infant is not unambiguously male or female because its genitalia are hard to classify as strictly male or strictly female. In whatever manner such infants (and later children and adults) are classified, be it as male or female or hermaphrodite, they are definitely not a third sex because there is nothing in their anatomy that produces or is designed to make use of a third type of gamete. )
Males undergo changes in puberty that cause them to be fundamentally larger and stronger than females, and this remains true even in individual post-puberty males who take medication to make them be more feminine.
Even after a decade of hormone therapy, trans women (males) are stronger and faster than women (females). [ https://bigthink.com/health/truth-about-transgender-womens-athletic-ability/?fbclid=IwAR3o7ow_kVnSwShtwjRPXqzzsA1ANwm8ZYPEuZg-qDOLfrkr4N8x4EFk48k ]
Another scientific journal reports:
Here, we review how differences in biological characteristics between biological males and females affect sporting performance and assess whether evidence exists to support the assumption that testosterone suppression in transgender women removes the male performance advantage and thus delivers fair and safe competition. We report that the performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10–50% depending on sport. The performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed. Sports organizations should consider this evidence when reassessing current policies regarding participation of transgender women in the female category of sport. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
Because women spend many years training hard to excel in competitive sports on the assumption that they will be competing only against other women, it is unfair to then change the rules of the game and make them compete against men. For example, to make women swimmers compete against men (as Univ. of Pennsylvania women swimmers are being made to compete against the trans woman Lia Thomas (read about this here and about having to share the locker/shower room with Thomas here) is morally wrong; it is like making women swimmers compete against dolphins.
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* MassEquality is one of the big LGBT organizations in Massachusetts that "Applauds Passage of Transgender Anti-Discrimination Bill by MA House" and it (as the "MassEquality Education Fund" [same url as MassEquality itself]) received $60,000 from the Tides Foundation in 2014, which is a conduit for Big Money from the Ford and Rockefeller and Heinz foundations, and the billionaire George Soros via his Open Society Foundation, and similar ruling class sources, as discussed in great detail here. [Note that links regarding corporate funding above were live when I first wrote this but have since disappeared. Here is a 2010 Tides report showing it gave MassEquality $43,000 and also gave the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition $35,000 that year. Regarding who funds the Tides Foundation, there is this information at https://www.ngo-monitor.org/funder/tides-network/:
Funding
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In 2021, the Tides Network’s total revenue was $1.4 billion; total expenses (primarily grants and awards) were $836 million.
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In 2020, Tides received $8.3 million from the Open Society Foundation.
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In 2019-2021, the Tides Network received $44,980 from the New Israel Fund.
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In 2020-2023, the Tides Center received $1.1 million from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, of which American NGO Palestine Legal received $150,000 (2021-2023) and the Adalah Justice Project received $250,000 (2020-2023).
“A movement that focuses on the levers of power rather than building grassroots support is one in which a few wealthy people can have considerable sway. They have shaped the global agenda by funding briefing documents, campaign groups, research and legal actions; endowing university chairs; and influencing health-care protocols.
"One is an American transwoman billionaire, Jennifer (James) Pritzker, a retired soldier and one of the heirs to a vast family fortune. Pritzker’s personal foundation, Tawani, makes grants to universities, the ACLU, GLAAD, HRC and smaller activist groups. To cite a couple of examples, in 2016 it gave the University of Victoria $ 2 million to endow a chair of trans-gender studies, and throughout the ‘bathroom wars’ it supported Equality Illinois Education Project, which is linked to a group campaigning for gender self-ID in the state.
"Two other billionaires, neither transgender, also spend lavishly on transactivism.
"One is Jon Stryker, another heir to a fortune. His foundation, Arcus, supports LGBT campaign group ILGA, and Transgender Europe, which channels funding to national self-ID campaigns. Arcus funds the LGBT Movement Advancement Project, which tracks gender-identity advocacy in dozens of countries (and partners with President Biden’s personal foundation on the Advancing Acceptance Initiative, which promotes early childhood transition). In 2015 Arcus announced that it would give $ 15 million in the next five years to American trans-rights groups. Among the recipients were the ACLU, the Transgender Law Center, the Trans Justice Funding Project and the Freedom Center for Social Justice, which campaigned against North Carolina’s bathroom law. In 2019, it gave $ 2 million to found a queer-studies programme at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and it funds Athlete Ally, the group that dropped Martina Navratilova as an ambassador when she opposed trans inclusion in female sports. In March 2021 he gave a further $ 15m to the ACLU, to be spent in part on pressing for legal change.
"A third billionaire funder of transactivism is George Soros, via his Open Society Foundations (OSF), a network of independently managed philanthropic institutions. OSF has made large donations to the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch (including $ 100 million in 2010, its biggest donation ever) and the HRC, all of which campaign for gender self-identification. OSF pays for the production of model laws and ‘best-practice’ documents on trans-related issues. To highlight just one example, in 2014 it supported ‘License to be Yourself’, a guide to campaigning for national gender self-ID laws. This argued, among other things, that children of any age should be able to change their legal sex at will.”
— Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women's Rights by Helen Joyce
Read more about the Pritzker billionaire family's role in promoting trans ideology in "The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI): The wealthy, powerful, and sometimes very weird Pritzker cousins have set their sights on a new God-like goal: using gender ideology to remake human biology" BY JENNIFER BILEK at
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers?fbclid=IwAR0vCFn6tvgFjImYQcrOO1kiIDpQnRT4_BX64NCc6on22JE5TRMREAHB2Gg
** There are some transgender persons (such as Lia Thomas) whose genitalia are the opposite of the gender with which they identify, either because they are too young to have their genitalia changed surgically or because for some reason they don't wish to do that. Such individuals may, for example, have male genitalia and wish to use the public-access women's shower/locker room instead of the men's facility. Their wish conflicts, however, with the reasonable expectations and desires of women not to share the women's facility with any person with male genitalia. It is not "oppression" to honor the perfectly reasonable expectations and desires of women by not allowing the transgender person in this example to shower with women. Any law that gives the transgender person in this example the right to use the women's public-access shower or locker facilities would, in practice, also allow a man who was born male to enter the women's facilities. Nude women are not able to confirm a nude stranger's claim that despite having male genitalia she (?) is really a female, are they? It is not bigotry to object to such an absurd law!
The transgender person in this example could very reasonably ask to use a private (for one person only) facility and if one does not exist they could ask for one to be created (even if only by the use of a temporary curtain or some such method) and they would likely get as much support in this request from people identifying as "conservative" as from those identifying as "liberal." But to accuse the women who don't want to shower with anybody having male genitalia of being "transphobic bigoted" oppressors is just plain wrong. Regarding ordinary bathrooms (as opposed to locker rooms or shower areas) any law about who may use which facility that directly or indirectly references type of genitalia is, in practice, irrelevant because as long as a person appears to be of the appropriate gender there's no problem since nobody else sees a person's genitalia if they use a bathroom stall and wish to be discreet, as any transgender person would naturally wish.
*** The HB2 law has parts in it that have nothing to do with "bathroom" facilities or gender (such as whether cities can pass their own minimum wage laws, etc.) The liberal media, however, is condemning the law as "oppressive, transphobic bigotry" for its "bathroom"/gender content, specifically, and not for its other content. It is only the "bathroom" content of the law that this website page is, therefore, concerned with.
**** Here are figures about the numbers of children in the United States seeking 'gender care' including top and bottom sex-change surgery. Note that "The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021."
***** Transgender people in sports is a different question from transgender people in bathrooms and locker and shower rooms. The issue in sports is fairness. In many kinds of sporting events, there is a good fairness-related reason for having separate male and female teams. If the event is one that makes superior physical strength an advantage, then males who have gone through male puberty will have an advantage over females. In a swimming race, for example, making women compete against such males would be unfair the same way it would be unfair to make women compete against dolphins. It is unfair to make girls/women who have worked hard for many years to excel in a sport on the understanding that they would be competing only against other women then have the rug pulled out from under them by being made to compete against innately stronger men.
Trans-women who have gone through male puberty should not compete against women. Trans-men, having not gone through male puberty, do not have an unfair physical-strength advantage over men and may thus fairly compete with men in a sport where superior physical strength is an advantage. Where physical strength is irrelevant (such as a chess match), being trans or not is also irrelevant to who can compete fairly with whom.
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Postscript August 21, 2022
The following is from an email I sent to some people who disagreed with me on this topic.
Here are my thoughts on the "who is right" question about the woman in the shower when a person unambiguously of the male sex enters it.
Consider a scenario in which a naked thirty-year old person named Pat of the male sex (whatever one might say about Pat's gender) with male genitalia and a beard and large muscles enters the women's shower room where there is a naked 30 year old woman named Mary who says to Pat, "You're in the wrong place and should leave" and the Pat says, "No, I'm a woman and have a right to be here."
This scenario is designed to get at the core principle, of social right, without any distracting details. Thus:
1. Pat is clearly and unambiguously of the male sex and shows no physical signs of transitioning to a female physical appearance.
2. Mary has no reason to doubt that Pat is of the male sex, regardless of what gender Pat claims to identify as.
3. Mary, like most women, knows the fact that very many 30 year old people of the male sex are likely to be sexually aroused by the sight of a naked 30 year old woman (see discussions of this well-known fact here and here) and that lust is a real phenomenon and therefore it is not unreasonable for her to be very uncomfortable (due to fear of possible rape) in the presence of Pat in the shower room.
4. Mary also knows that she cannot tell what Pat is likely to do or not do based merely on the words he utters to her. As far as Mary can tell, Pat might be a voyeur heterosexual male intent on ogling her or molesting her or even raping her.
The policy of "people with the same genitalia, and only people of the same genitalia, shower together (with possible exceptions for very young children) and that there should be private one-person-only showers for those who may not feel comfortable showering with others present" is designed to spare people like Mary from suffering great discomfort (fear). I support this policy and think Mary is in the right in this scenario.
Now let's consider the contrary opinion, which is that Mary's behavior in this scenario is morally wrong (fascist) because it is morally indistinguishable from her racist behavior if, when in a second alternate scenario a black 30 year old woman named Stella entered the shower, she (Mary) told Stella, "You must leave because you are black and this is a whites-only shower."
Here is why the two scenarios are not morally analogous.
In the first scenario, Mary has good reason--based on fact--to feel very uncomfortable (fearful) in the presence of Pat. In the second scenario, in contrast, Mary does not have good reason based on fact to feel very uncomfortable (fearful) in the presence of Stella; Mary might indeed feel uncomfortable (fearful) in the presence of Stella but only because she believes racist lies she has been told about black people, not because she has factual reasons for feeling uncomfortable (fearful.)
What do you think?
By the way, I have heard three people (one a trans woman I know personally, and one (the woman who authored this letter), and one a trans person on a web chat all say that trans women with pre-op (i.e., male) genitalia are extremely averse to displaying their genitalia to women in a public shower; the trans person on the chat said that such a display amounts to wrongful "ideological exhibitionism." Read here a trans woman saying that young trans girls (with male genitalia) have absolutely no desire to be naked in front of girls. Read here another trans woman saying this:
"And the trans girls? There is no way that, given their druthers, they’d choose to shower openly with cisgender girls and display their penises."
I believe that most trans people support the policy of "people with the same genitalia, and only people of the same genitalia, shower together (with possible exceptions for very young children) and that there should be private one-person-only showers for those (trans or not) who may not feel comfortable showering with others present" and that it is the trans people in Big Money-funded organizations who support the contrary new "bathroom" laws that, in Massachusetts, would subject Mary to a $100 fine and/or 30 days in prison for telling Pat to leave. I think these bathroom laws are being enacted purely to divide-and-rule the have-nots and not at all to make life better for trans people.
Postscript October 8, 2022: Are a substantial number of adolescents and young adults developing gender dysphoria due to social and cultural influences--peer pressure--rather than due to innate pre-existing gender dysphoria? Does this explain the sharp rise in gender dysphoria among adolescents and young adults lately?
Here is a PLOS ONE research article (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330) titled, "Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of rapid onset of gender dysphoria." The Abstract, Purpose begins:
"In on-line forums, parents have reported that their children seemed to experience a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, appearing the first time during puberty or even after its completion. Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe. Parents also report that their children exhibited an increase in social media/internet use prior to disclosure of a transgender identity."
This science.org article ( https://www.science.org/content/article/new-paper-ignites-storm-over-whether-teens-experience-rapid-onset-transgender-identity) discusses the above article. The article reports:
"The most explosive of Littman's findings may be that among the young people reported on—83% of whom were designated female at birth—more than one-third had friendship groups in which 50% or more of the youths began to identify as transgender in a similar time frame. This, she writes, was more than 70 times the expected prevalence of transgender identity in young adults, which she reports is 0.7%. Littman hypothesizes that "social contagion" may be a key driver of the purportedly rapid onset dysphoria. To trans activists, such a suggestion risks both stigmatizing and further isolating transgender young people from their peers and from the resources that could support them."
Postscript March 29, 2023:
a. "Transsexualism has become today some kind of a fashionary self-diagnosis, as Asperger’s was in 2000s and 2010s, and it is quite clear only a fraction of those really are genuine cases - the Dutch estimate the frequency for genuine transsexualism is around 1:10,000." from a very informative Quora post about the transsexual phenomenon at https://www.quora.com/The-Tavistock-youth-gender-clinic-in-London-was-shut-down-after-doctors-expressed-concerned-about-the-increase-in-numbers-as-well-as-the-dearth-of-data-on-long-term-safety-and-outcomes-of-medical-transitions-Do-you/answer/Susanna-Viljanen?ch=17&oid=1477743653604735&share=107df1c0&srid=Muxc&target_type=answer&fbclid=IwAR0f7VHXbj1CN0RNbHqLu_Ci3RIyv1hOSG0e39-bevG1SKo37-LPmFz-5KQ
b. "For this article, Reuters spoke to 17 people who began medical transition as minors and said they now regretted some or all of their transition. Many said they realized only after transitioning that they were homosexual, or they always knew they were lesbian or gay but felt, as adolescents, that it was safer or more desirable to transition to a gender that made them heterosexual." from "Why detransitioners are crucial to the science of gender care" at https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-outcomes/ .
Postscript April 3, 2023: "What Our Skeletons Say About the Sex Binary" at https://www.sapiens.org/biology/intersex-biological-sex/?fbclid=IwAR0eO7zEIWd_eMx-cXeALK4uaxp3bXP9Q-M4R4KPR_t4j-2ea-3qlx3kzqY
For a somewhat different take that does not necessarily conflict with the above linked article, see this one: https://humanpsychologyfacts.quora.com/https-www-quora-com-What-are-all-the-biological-differences-between-boys-and-girls-answer-David-Pratt-266?ch=17&oid=107948653&share=0fa2c6bc&srid=Muxc&target_type=post
Postscript April 18, 2023:
"Calif. mom Aurora Regino rails against school district’s ‘parental secrecy’ policy after daughter’s gender transition. A California woman railed against her 11-year-old daughter’s school district over its so-called “parental secrecy” policy after it quietly helped the child transition from female to male – even though the girl wanted the counselor to inform her mom.
Aurora Regino claimed during a meeting of the Chico Unified School Board last week that her daughter’s school allowed the child to transition to a new identity in class without her knowledge or consent, The Daily Signal reported." [one source is: https://nypost.com/2023/04/14/calif-mom-slams-schools-parental-secrecy-policy-after-daughters-gender-transition/?fbclid=IwAR3oAM1TVakpfjrr2lVj0a5HJuoWtJ22E6Gyxwn0mIuJfdaTWGT1a_KIVvU ]
Postscript April 19, 2023:
#1.
"Gender-affirming care for transgender kids is going to backfire: experts. When her biological daughter Alex* came out as transgender at the age of 12, Anna* offered her support instantly — but she also had concerns. The New York City-based mom knew her child also suffered from autism, severe depression and self-harm, and hoped that any psychologist exploring a transition with her child would consider all those conditions as part of the treatment. Instead, she says her child was offered puberty blockers after a 10-minute evaluation at “the best possible clinic” for transgender care in New York. “My child’s autism was completely overlooked,” Anna told The Post.
#2.
"Access to care and frequency of detransition among a cohort discharged by a UK national adult gender identity clinic: retrospective case-note review....Twelve people (6.9%) met our case definition of detransitioning....Conclusions: Service users may have unmet needs. Neurodevelopmental disorders or ACEs suggest complexity requiring consideration during the assessment process. Managing mental ill health and substance misuse during treatment needs optimising. Detransitioning might be more frequent than previously reported." https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/3F5AC1315A49813922AAD76D9E28F5CB/S205647242101022Xa.pdf/access_to_care_and_frequency_of_detransition_among_a_cohort_discharged_by_a_uk_national_adult_gender_identity_clinic_retrospective_casenote_review.pdf
#3.
"Continuation of Gender-affirming Hormones Among Transgender Adolescents and Adults"
"The 4-year gender-affirming hormone continuation rate was 70.2% (95% CI, 63.9-76.5)."
Note, this means that about 30% of those who began gender-affirming hormone treatment chose to discontinue it by the fourth year. https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/107/9/e3937/6572526?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Postscript April 23, 2023: "Trans prisoner who impregnated two female inmates is ‘psychopath’: foster mom" [ https://nypost.com/2022/08/05/trans-prisoner-who-impregnated-two-women-is-psychopath/ ] This is also reported on at https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nj-trans-prisoner-impregnated-2-inmates-transferred-mens-facility-rcna38947 .
More news articles related to trans women prisoners in female prison facilities:
reports:
"Since January, the majority of the inmates, 255, were biological men identifying as transgender women and non-binary, who requested gender-based housing and to be transferred to a female-only facility. Six biological women identifying as transgender men and non-binary requested to be transferred to a male-only facility, according to a statement from Deputy Press Secretary Terry Thornton."
Note that in the general population, while there are more MtF than FtM trans people, the ratio MtF:FtM is not more than 4:1 (source: https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/23841/why-are-trans-women-more-common-than-trans-men?fbclid=IwAR1mZdHCjYNG0wdUPP2DRyMRhO13s89q7IVKWGOdrqkVgqOuUT1O3BNlOP0 ), whereas the ratio among prisoners cited in this article of MtF:FtM is (255-6):6 is more than 41:1 . This would suggest that most of the MtF prisoners do not truly believe they are females. As pointed out in an article I linked to above, male prisoners have a very strong motive for not wanting to be in a male prison, namely it is a dangerous place to be; and so they check the "female" box to be transferred to a safer place, i.e., female prison.
i. "4. I am very offended at being treated by the Proposed Intervenors and their counsel as if I am some sort of bigot. I have trans friends and we have no problems. I don’t want the biological females who identify as trans or nonbinary to be transferred to men’s prisons, and nobody on this case is asking for that. It is not bigoted to ask for sex-separated facilities when I am changing, showering, sleeping, and using the toilet. We have a right to insist on accommodations that give some privacy and dignity." --from a woman prisoner's sworn testimony at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f232ea74d8342386a7ebc52/t/6297b43a683f4e20e5e92b28/1654109243107/Tomiekia+Johnson+Declaration.pdf
j. "Now, Dori and his listeners heard directly from a former state Department of Corrections guard that more than 150 biologically male inmates serving time in other all-male corrections facilities around Washington are lining up to transfer to Gig Harbor’s WCCW because it’s “significantly easier” to serve time with women.
“They are bringing biological males who claim to identify as females and putting them into the women’s prison,” former state DOC officer Scott Fleming confirmed to Dori Thursday. “All that they have to claim is that they identify as a female.”
No requirements for hormone treatment? No confirmation that inmate is in the transitioning process? No proof that gender or sexual reassignment surgery had occurred?
None, Fleming said.
“When I was there . . . all they had to do was claim they identified as females and convince a psychologist to sign off on it,” Fleming confirmed.
What’s behind the interest to transfer, Dori asked.
“There’s less of a threat to you physically (if you’re a biological male in the women’s facility) and the potential for having a sexual relationship or forcing yourself on [women] is pretty high,” Fleming added.
Fleming’s observations are based on his five years of service at Stafford Creek Maximum Security facility for men in Aberdeen and his three years at the women’s prison in Gig Harbor."
"Last year, The Dori Monson Show broke a story about a transgender inmate, born as a biological male, allegedly raping a developmentally-disabled woman while both were confined behind bars at the Washington State Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) in Gig Harbor."
https://mynorthwest.com/3445157/dori-corrections-guard-details-rape-biologically-male-prisoners-transgender-inmate/
k. The Geneva Convention rules regarding the need to separate female from male prisoners, described at https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ar/customary-ihl/v2/rule119
The Association for the Prevention of Torture states:
"As a matter of principle, women should be separated from men, minors from adults, and untried detainees from convicted detainees. Migrants detained in connection with their migrant status should be separated from convicted persons and held in conditions as far removed from a prison regime as possible. Persons imprisoned for debt and other civil prisoners should be kept separate from persons imprisoned for criminal offenses.
The principle of separation should result in either the existence of units strictly separate from each other within the same facility, or of special institutions for the groups concerned. Separation measures should not lead to restrictions of access to services and care, or to the deterioration of material conditions of detention for the persons concerned." [ https://www.apt.ch/en/knowledge-hub/detention-focus-database/safety-order-and-discipline/separation-detainees ]
l. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-man-should-ever-be-sent-to-a-womens-prison-again/
j. from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/62/4/1000/6370239?login=false :
The complexities of transitions were discussed by most participants with a range of views on transitions, although these tended to focus on bodily, specifically genital, aspects. For Ellie, below, a transgender woman having a penis undermined any other efforts to transition through, for example, hormones:
If they’re maybe going through the change and they’re on the hormones and that, but, like, she’s still got a fucking willy and all that, do you know what I mean.
Ellie went onto frame her views more widely in discussing other aspects of the transitions transgender women were undertaking, being undermined by the presence of male genitalia:
I don’t think that you’re fully female still with all those parts and you’re not even on the hormones or…nothing like that. It’s just you’ve grown your hair and you’ve put makeup on and call yourself a woman.
Emily continues this theme below, in suggesting that the transitions of transgender people might be an attempt by paedophiles or other sex offenders to access cis-women in the female prison estate. This quote is framed within a context that Emily viewed the transition this person was undertaking as inauthentic:
And I feel like that transgender, that’s just an act to get into a females’ jail because awful. And this transgender had been telling the paedophiles, how to get over to female jail, over to the female side. That is one thing I won’t stick for, like, a beast to transgender. Don’t come over to a female jail when you raped two lassies.
Here, and in the rest of the interview, Emily referred to the transgender people, not by name or ‘he’/she’ but as ‘transgender’. The fear that transitioning from male to female might enable men who pose a threat to cis-women to move to the female estate was discussed by a number of participants. Ellie was quite clear about her views about a particular transgender woman (Susan), who she felt was transitioning for the wrong reasons:
There’s a transgender [wo]man (Susan). He worked in the...my work party. His views were totally wrong. He wanted to be in this hall because he wanted to have sex with loads of lassies.
k. from https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/dont-come-youve-raped-two-26545004 :
Just over half of the respondents said they still viewed transgender women as men and "consequently as a threat due to previous experiences of violence and abuse".
Postscript May 2, 2023 Scientific article regarding differences in the brains of trans versus non-trans individuals:
a. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/6/1582 transgender sample was 45.7 ± 13.8 years (range 23–72 years).
Postscript May 5, 2023: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a 2015 report titled "Ending Conversion Therapy: Supporting and Affirming LGBTQ Youth" (PDF) asserts (pg. 9):
" • There is limited research on conversion therapy efforts among children and adolescents; however, none of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation.
• Interventions aimed at a fixed outcome, such as gender conformity or heterosexual orientation, including those aimed at changing gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation are coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment. (American Psychiatric Association, 2013b; American Psychological Association, 2010; National Association of Social Workers, 2008)."
This is the basis on which hospitals and clinics in the United States do not provide psychiatric therapy to youth with gender dysphoria and instead adopt a "gender affirming" policy (such as this one from Seattle Children's Hospital) of relying only on medical interventions such as puberty blocking drugs and "sex-change" surgery, despite the fact children sometimes regret undergoing such medical procedures.
An AP article that emphasizes that it is rare for a child to regret medical sex-change intervention cites the reason for this being "comprehensive psychological counseling before starting treatment":
"Research suggests that comprehensive psychological counseling before starting treatment, along with family support, can reduce chances for regret and detransitioning."
But with guidelines such as that of the HHS, such "comprehensive psychological counseling" is vanishing from clinical practice. Now we are seeing reports of children who regret having undergone puberty blocking and sex-change surgery (see here for some.)
Furthermore, there is evidence that the recent sharp increase in the number of children expressing the belief that their gender is different from the sex of their body is due in substantial part to peer pressure, exactly the kind of thing that would be most usefully dealt with by psychological counseling and not medical procedures. Here is some evidence of this:
Here is a PLOS ONE research article (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330) titled, "Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of rapid onset of gender dysphoria." The Abstract, Purpose begins:
"In on-line forums, parents have reported that their children seemed to experience a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, appearing the first time during puberty or even after its completion. Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe. Parents also report that their children exhibited an increase in social media/internet use prior to disclosure of a transgender identity."
This science.org article ( https://www.science.org/content/article/new-paper-ignites-storm-over-whether-teens-experience-rapid-onset-transgender-identity) discusses the above article. The article reports:
"The most explosive of Littman's findings may be that among the young people reported on—83% of whom were designated female at birth—more than one-third had friendship groups in which 50% or more of the youths began to identify as transgender in a similar time frame. This, she writes, was more than 70 times the expected prevalence of transgender identity in young adults, which she reports is 0.7%. Littman hypothesizes that "social contagion" may be a key driver of the purportedly rapid onset dysphoria. To trans activists, such a suggestion risks both stigmatizing and further isolating transgender young people from their peers and from the resources that could support them."
An informative Quora post about the transsexualism phenomenon says: "Transsexualism has become today some kind of a fashionary self-diagnosis, as Asperger’s was in 2000s and 2010s, and it is quite clear only a fraction of those really are genuine cases - the Dutch estimate the frequency for genuine transsexualism is around 1:10,000." at https://www.quora.com/The-Tavistock-youth-gender-clinic-in-London-was-shut-down-after-doctors-expressed-concerned-about-the-increase-in-numbers-as-well-as-the-dearth-of-data-on-long-term-safety-and-outcomes-of-medical-transitions-Do-you/answer/Susanna-Viljanen?ch=17&oid=1477743653604735&share=107df1c0&srid=Muxc&target_type=answer&fbclid=IwAR0f7VHXbj1CN0RNbHqLu_Ci3RIyv1hOSG0e39-bevG1SKo37-LPmFz-5KQ
Additionally, there is growing evidence of harm caused by puberty blockers (not to mention sex-change surgery when the child later regrets it!): See reports of this here (NYT) and here (The Economist).