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I can't say that I follow the news on identity politics closely, but my understanding from liberal sources is that conservatives believe that people should use

• foldr 10y ago
  >and they don't know or care about whether someone is post-op or pre-op or genderqueer or any of the other gradations of gender. But to enforce the policy you have to care about precisely this, because there are plenty of transmen who look like men and transwomen who look like women. So in practice you have to go around asking every man/woman in the bathroom whether they have a penis/vagina. If you "don't care" whether someone is genderqueer or not, then simply let men use the men's bathroom and women use the women's bathroom, without bothering to check their genitals first.
  • x1798DE 10y ago
    Again, my understanding is that they don't care what gender you say you are or where you are on the physical spectrum, they care about your gender at birth. This does not necessitate anything further than, "I was born male" or "I was born female", referring to biological sex, except in edge cases like chromosomal abnormalities and ambiguous genitalia. Handling cases of biological gender ambiguities is not covered by the emerging vocabulary around the gender spectrum, so again, those distinctions are entirely meaningless to conservatives. If your hypothesis were true and these increasingly precise distinctions of sexual and gender identity are a response to conservatives, why did they emerge only after liberal attitudes became prevalent enough that people could openly embrace these identities? One would expect that if they cared about these subtleties, these differences would have been more important when the conservative viewpoint was near universal.
    • foldr 10y ago
      I think maybe you’re not picturing how such a regulation would work in practice. Suppose someone who looks like a woman goes into the women’s bathroom. Do you ask them if they have a penis, or do you just let them use the bathroom? To enforce the regulation that people have to use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex, you would have to continually ask people about their genitalia. In other words, you’d have to continually take an interest in whether any given woman is a transwoman or a cis woman. Also, I didn’t quite say that increasingly precise distinctions of sexual and general identity are a response to conservatives. I said that it’s because of conservatives that these distinctions are thought to be (and in practice are) very important. If we lived in some kind of free-wheeling hippy society, then these aspects of people would be of the same level of interest as, say, their dietary preferences. As things currently stand, if you are a woman with a penis, there are lots of people ready and waiting to tell you that you're not really a woman. It's hardly surprising that transwomen take their gender identity very seriously when it's constantly under attack. Nor is it surprising that they construct new categories (e.g. 'transwoman') when the existing categories are so rigidly policed.
      • GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
        > Do you ask them if they have a penis, or do you just let them use the bathroom And in case anybody thinks this is just hyperbole: http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/self-appointed-bathroom-cop-catches-dallas-woman-using-womens-restroom-8259104 http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/self-appointed-bathroom-c...
      • DashRattlesnake 10y ago
        > I think maybe you’re not picturing how such a regulation would work in practice. Suppose someone who looks like a woman goes into the women’s bathroom. Do you ask them if they have a penis, or do you just let them use the bathroom? If you're trying to reason about what social conservatives think, it probably doesn't help to concoct some strawman half-LGBT half-social conservative ideology. A social conservative ideology doesn't have the dilemma you describe because, for them, gender expression should conform to sex. Any... > interest in whether any given woman is a transwoman or a cis woman ...was foisted on social conservatives from outside. They don't have an innate interest or need for such finely-graded labels.