Specify the rights then
This question about rights again…
That SNP Students tweet –
At SNP students, we have one simple belief. Trans rights are human rights. No ifs, no buts.
It’s a simple belief, yes, so simple that we don’t even know what it means.
What, exactly, are trans rights? Specifically trans rights? SNP Students says human rights, but if that really is what they mean there’s no issue. The controversy isn’t because trans people want the same rights everybody else has, because no one questions their right to that. The controversy is because trans people want new rights special to trans people, that in fact, however loudly they deny it, conflict with the existing rights of non-trans people, especially women.
What are we talking about when we talk about rights? In the most general terms? We’re talking about foundational principles like
- Xs are not inferior to Ys
- Xs should not be subordinated by Ys
- Xs should not be persecuted or ostracized by Ys
- Xs should not face systematic disadvantages because they are Xs
But what are trans rights? Judging by the current dogma, the core right is to be “validated” as the alter-sex and to be “included” as such by all members of the alter-sex.
Is that a right like the rights we’re used to? Can you get to that right via the foundational principles? Did I omit any relevant foundational principles?
How about the right not to be ostracized by the dominant group? Can we get there via that route?
I don’t think so, because the ostracism in question is broad. People have a right not to be ostracized from the public square and from public goods and a shared public life. People don’t have a right to be welcomed into every single category and grouping there is in all circumstances and with no questions asked. White people don’t have a right to be welcomed into black activist groups, for instance; some groups may welcome them and others may not and everybody’s rights remain intact.
Is there a right to be taken at face value? A right to be believed without question no matter what you claim? A right to be embraced no matter how abrasive and domineering your behavior is?
I don’t think so.
Sex appeared in organisms very early in the history of life, arguably at the bacterial level, and for reasons well agreed upon and understood by scientists, and with regard to every classificatory level of life. Again, for reasons pretty well understood and demystified today, it is based on the binary either/or principle of males and females, which arguably rests on the fact that DNA is a double helix, with one half of its ladder derived from the female parent, and the other half from the male parent, and with effectively infinite recombination possibilities built in. If the DNA structure was a triple helix, somewhat like a twisted triangular prism (eg a spiralling radio transmission tower), each individual of each generation would need either: three parents each contributing one third of the full complement of its genes, or two parents, with one contributing twice as many genes as the other.
Nature could have conceivably produced and selected in such a ternary (three-way) system, whereby three, not two, parents would be biologically necessary to produce any offspring of any given species. For that matter, Nature could have produced and selected in an N-point scale, where N is any whole number greater than two. However, and in all species on this planet, she keeps choosing not to.
But, just to complicate things a bit, what she did do was introduce a pleasure component into sex, and probably in all animals, turning it away from being an optional activity (as it is in its own way in species with a mating season) and towards being a fluctuating and with varied intensity but constant drive displayed or manifested differently in each sex. Arguably, lack of an anthropoid mating season has a major component of primate evolution, but coupled with a gratification-seeking drive, it has caused certain problems.
Reproduction-wise, there can be no such entity as ‘trans-sex’. (‘Gender’ is a word I prefer to reserve for grammatical discussions.) But there is ‘trans-sex’ drive-wise, and public space is not equipped to accommodate it.
I can understand women generally not wanting to share toilets and dressing-rooms (eg at beaches and public bathing facilities) with people they regard as being of the opposite sex.
There is, after all. An element of sanctuary involved.
Omar, this is another area of the trans- dogma that is really very religious in its thinking, namely the placing of humans above and seperate all other animals. All animals operate on the male/female binary and are stuck with their sex throughout their lives, but we are now expected to believe that humans are the exception – we can choose the sex we want to be. That idea is fully in keeping with Genesis (the book, not the band), in which we are told that God made humans seperate from the animals.
Yet I have seen gender critical thinking described as ‘gender creationism’. Go figure.
This seems to be happening a lot in a lot of fields. You simply identify your opponent’s position as the one that has already been accepted as ‘bad’. That saves you a lot of work. You don’t have to demonstrate why it is bad, you just have to call it a name. It doesn’t matter if the name fits or not, because your adherents will pick it up and parrot it and retweet it and magnify the signal so much that in the end, no one will remember that things were ever different, that the words they are using don’t mean what they say they do, or that they have never done one thing to demonstrate logically and empirically what is wrong or bad about their opponents position.
The right were the pioneers on this technique, I believe (though it may be it goes back further than I realize) but the left have proven quite adept at it. In short, there is a lot of reaching across the aisle when it comes to irrational, illogical argumentation.
It’s the same method the Republicans used when they labelled the ACA ‘Obamacare’, despite the bulk of the bill being drawn up by the Bush Jnr. administration. Had Romney become president, the ACA would have been hailed by the right as the best thing ever, but by attaching Obama’s name to it, they assured that it was soiled by association.
No, this is not how parental genetic donation works. The mother donates one copy of each chromosome, numbered 1-12, plus an X chromosome, making 13 in total. The father donates one copy of each chromosome, plus an X or Y, making 13 in total. Each chromosome is donated whole and complete from that parent, i.e. with both sides of the double helix present, thus the number of sexes has nothing to do with the double helix nature of DNA.
Holms: Ah, yes. My mistake. Noted, and with thanks.