The NYT Explains That There Are No Problems At All Associated With Transgender Troops In The Military Except For Your Bigotry, Bigot
Yet another glowing, completely one-sided account of a transgender issue from the NYT.
Part of the problem, of course, is that it's hard to get the facts given the quasi-religious adoration of this sort of thing on the left, together with the fact that progressives control both the media and academia.
It should go without saying that I incline toward maximizing freedom and individual choice. And it's good to be nice when possible. I'm inclined to think that, at our current level of medical technology, it's better to learn to be happy with the body you have than to endure extensive medical treatments that can only vaguely simulate a sex-change. I don't deny that some people may have such a strong desire to be the other sex that currently-available treatments might be worthwhile to them. Needless to say, however, we can't actually change someone's sex (though we might be able to someday).
It seems that it should be up to the military to decide whether it can accommodate such personnel. And this is really just one specific corner of the general question: is it reasonable for us to have sex-segregated facilities and institutions? If so, where do transgenders fit into them? Should a man who has had medical treatments to seem womanly continue to participate in men's institutions and use men's facilities? Or should he participate in women's institutions and use women's facilities? And what if he has merely declared himself a woman, but received no treatments? The most natural answer in both cases is obviously: he's still a man, so he remains, e.g., ineligible for women's scholarships, and he should continue to use the men's locker room. Transgender ideology insists on the opposite answers.
If we think hard about this and experiment with options, we might very well end up concluding that we should abandon all sex-segregation. Or we might conclude that we should keep it in place but bend the conventions in some cases. One thing we really can't conclude is: it's possible for a man to be female (also: for a woman to be male). That--the central claim of transgender ideology--simply isn't coherent. Men can be feminine, and they can even be womanly, but they can't be women. This is a fairly straightforward conceptual truth, and there's no sense trying to finesse it.
Unfortunately, the left has done transgenders no favors, really. It's insisted on three insane articles of blind faith:
1. It's possible for women to be male and men to be female.
2. It's possible to change your sex by simply declaring it to be so.
3. It is an act of heinous bigotry tantamount to racism to doubt 1 and 2.
1-3 simply have to be wiped off the table so that we can have an intelligent public discussion of what's really going on. And the nonstop stream of propaganda from the progressive media isn't helping. All it's really doing is confirming the obvious conclusion that they're not objective about such matters and are dedicated to pushing a political position, not to the rational evaluation of that position. (Sidebar: Fox News may be nuts, but they don't simply run stories that presuppose that it's possible to turn night into day simply by saying so. In that respect, they're head and shoulders above the NYT and Washington Post...)
And, of course, none of this addresses the fact that the NYT has obviously carefully chosen the most favorable cases it could find in order to advance the progressive agenda. A more objective assessment would, undoubtedly, paint a more equivocal picture.
I'm inclined to think that all major decisions about such things need to be put on hold until control of the debate is wrested from the left. Only after these matters cease to be subject to wild shrieking and quasi-religious dogma will the public debate be able to proceed in a rational manner. Who knows? When that eventually happens, we may decide that the most conservative and socially economical course of action is to basically treat certain people as if they were the other sex. This won't involve nuttiness like pretending that some men need to see gynecologists and all that. But it might very well involve allowing some men to use women's locker rooms and so on.
I tend to be against using public money to pay for people's elective surgery--and no matter how many times the NYT tells me that it's "only" going to cost $10 million per year that's probably not going to change. But, hell, so long as insurance companies are free to make rational decisions, I'm willing to let the chips fall where they may.
For now, we should stick with whatever the status quo ante was until rational public debate is possible. Having such a policy in general would also take away some of the incentive for progressives to ram through their social engineering initiatives via the force of shrill outrage. We ought to have a policy of simply refusing to change institutions until such shrieking exhausts itself.
Part of the problem, of course, is that it's hard to get the facts given the quasi-religious adoration of this sort of thing on the left, together with the fact that progressives control both the media and academia.
It should go without saying that I incline toward maximizing freedom and individual choice. And it's good to be nice when possible. I'm inclined to think that, at our current level of medical technology, it's better to learn to be happy with the body you have than to endure extensive medical treatments that can only vaguely simulate a sex-change. I don't deny that some people may have such a strong desire to be the other sex that currently-available treatments might be worthwhile to them. Needless to say, however, we can't actually change someone's sex (though we might be able to someday).
It seems that it should be up to the military to decide whether it can accommodate such personnel. And this is really just one specific corner of the general question: is it reasonable for us to have sex-segregated facilities and institutions? If so, where do transgenders fit into them? Should a man who has had medical treatments to seem womanly continue to participate in men's institutions and use men's facilities? Or should he participate in women's institutions and use women's facilities? And what if he has merely declared himself a woman, but received no treatments? The most natural answer in both cases is obviously: he's still a man, so he remains, e.g., ineligible for women's scholarships, and he should continue to use the men's locker room. Transgender ideology insists on the opposite answers.
If we think hard about this and experiment with options, we might very well end up concluding that we should abandon all sex-segregation. Or we might conclude that we should keep it in place but bend the conventions in some cases. One thing we really can't conclude is: it's possible for a man to be female (also: for a woman to be male). That--the central claim of transgender ideology--simply isn't coherent. Men can be feminine, and they can even be womanly, but they can't be women. This is a fairly straightforward conceptual truth, and there's no sense trying to finesse it.
Unfortunately, the left has done transgenders no favors, really. It's insisted on three insane articles of blind faith:
1. It's possible for women to be male and men to be female.
2. It's possible to change your sex by simply declaring it to be so.
3. It is an act of heinous bigotry tantamount to racism to doubt 1 and 2.
1-3 simply have to be wiped off the table so that we can have an intelligent public discussion of what's really going on. And the nonstop stream of propaganda from the progressive media isn't helping. All it's really doing is confirming the obvious conclusion that they're not objective about such matters and are dedicated to pushing a political position, not to the rational evaluation of that position. (Sidebar: Fox News may be nuts, but they don't simply run stories that presuppose that it's possible to turn night into day simply by saying so. In that respect, they're head and shoulders above the NYT and Washington Post...)
And, of course, none of this addresses the fact that the NYT has obviously carefully chosen the most favorable cases it could find in order to advance the progressive agenda. A more objective assessment would, undoubtedly, paint a more equivocal picture.
I'm inclined to think that all major decisions about such things need to be put on hold until control of the debate is wrested from the left. Only after these matters cease to be subject to wild shrieking and quasi-religious dogma will the public debate be able to proceed in a rational manner. Who knows? When that eventually happens, we may decide that the most conservative and socially economical course of action is to basically treat certain people as if they were the other sex. This won't involve nuttiness like pretending that some men need to see gynecologists and all that. But it might very well involve allowing some men to use women's locker rooms and so on.
I tend to be against using public money to pay for people's elective surgery--and no matter how many times the NYT tells me that it's "only" going to cost $10 million per year that's probably not going to change. But, hell, so long as insurance companies are free to make rational decisions, I'm willing to let the chips fall where they may.
For now, we should stick with whatever the status quo ante was until rational public debate is possible. Having such a policy in general would also take away some of the incentive for progressives to ram through their social engineering initiatives via the force of shrill outrage. We ought to have a policy of simply refusing to change institutions until such shrieking exhausts itself.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:27 AM
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