Equal protection
It all depends on how you look at it.
US Supreme Court tosses rulings that favored transgender people
Did they favor trans people though? Depends on how you look at it.
The U.S. Supreme Court threw out on Monday judicial decisions that favored transgender people in cases from North Carolina, West Virginia, Idaho and Oklahoma, including in legal challenges to state health insurance programs that deny coverage for patients seeking gender-affirming medical treatment.
That’s a car-crash of a sentence. The issue isn’t “favoring” trans people, it’s whether there is such a thing as “gender-affirming medical treatment.” Affirming gender isn’t really a medical category – gender itself isn’t really a medical category. Sex is, and sex is not switchable.
What the reporter was trying to say is that the Court threw out decisions that challenged health insurance that refuses to pay for efforts to change sex. It’s not obvious to gender atheists that insurance should pay for efforts to change sex. It can’t be done, so why waste money trying, and that’s before we even get to the whole “first do no harm” thing.
It’s just not obvious that doctors and hospitals should be trying to change people’s sex, so it’s not obvious that insurance plans should pay them to do so.
The Supreme Court decided that Tennessee’s ban on youth transgender care did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment promise of equal protection, as challengers to the law had argued. The court’s conservative justices were in the majority and liberal justices in dissent in the 6-3 decision.
What if the real equal protection here is protecting credulous adolescents from people who claim sex can be returned to the store for an upgrade?
Gender dysphoria is the clinical diagnosis for significant distress that can result from an incongruence between a person’s gender identity and the sex assigned at birth.
Now define “significant distress.” Explain how it differs from, for instance, significant distress over being too short or tall, too fat or thin, too yourself instead of someone else. Explain how it’s a medical issue, and how it’s known for certain that surgical or pharmaceutical interventions will make everything better. Explain how anyone knows for sure that significant distress about the self won’t resolve itself as the person in distress gets older.
I will agree that body dysphoria can cause distress; I don’t know if it’s significant or not, since it’s hard to get any kind of statistical analysis on a feeling. I can sympathize with people in distress over their body; I’ve been there, I am there, I may always be there. I look in the mirror and feel like a stranger looks back, so I just don’t look in the mirror. That isn’t an answer for everyone, but since I quit wearing make up. it’s sort of easy. I would never imagine my problems could be solved simply by cutting and pasting to ‘fix’ my body. My approach has been to try and come to grips with the reality that I know intellectually – of course that is me in the mirror, I am my body, and the fact that it seems like a stranger is in my head. So I’m working on having my head fixed. (And insurance usually pays for that. though some plans pay very poorly.) It’s better that way…there is no blood, no missing parts, and no life long procedures to face.
I’m in agreement with iknklast. I don’t like my body. Never mind my historical dislike due to the inexplicable and uncomfortable restrictions and expectations placed on me by society because of it. And never mind the serious pain and unpleasant effects of having a female reproductive system (thankfully removed nigh on three decades ago). It’s now old, with all that entails, in addition to being disastrous both genetically and as a result of injuries and infections. It constantly prevents me from fulfilling even modest ambitions, such as spending an hour out of bed, and it fucking hurts all the time, so I sleep really badly. I have prosopagnosia, so I can’t remember what my face looks like, and on the rare occasions in the past when I put some makeup on, I wiped it off because it looked so weird.
I’m extremely glad that, thanks to B&W, I desisted from the belief that I might be better off if I attempted to turn into a man – I would have been considerably worse off.
I’ve been reading (on Facebook) screenshots of absolutely heartbreaking stories by young people in their twenties who were rushed through the process as children, and have realised that the dream they were sold before they could reason was actually a terrible nightmare from which they cannot awaken.
“Gender atheist.” Thanks for that.
I like to tell religious people that they have more in common with atheists than they think: like me, they also don’t believe in the vast majority of deities that have ever been worshipped. I just go a tiny bit farther.
Just so. I don’t know why people’s refusal to accept their accidents of birth are so hard to cope with. There are many things we wish we were; healthy, wealthy, exquisitely beautiful, genius, etc. But we aren’t, and most of us come to grips with that at a young age. Isn’t it easier to accept who you are? I don’t know how the self deception works in such a way that it becomes a refusal or a denial of self, and I think the people who indulge “trans” people in their fantasies are doing them an injustice, and I don’t mean the drag queens and crossdressers, because that’s just a fetish, and hey, live and let live is what I always say, and a lot of them are under no illusions of their biological reality. I suppose there is gender dysphoria, and I feel like we should treat them with all the respect and sympathy that we would anyone else, whether handicapped in some way, or not meeting the standards of what we think is average or normal (whatever that means), but for them to insist that we give them special consideration for something that they created in their minds is asking too much.
Becoming a mature adult isn’t always an easy thing, and if someone were to focus only on what they want, as an immature person, then there are places on the internet where they can reinforce their fantasies, insist they are something they are not, and have credulous, ignorant cheerleaders to tell them how brave and special they are.
So it’s not simply a matter of immaturity, but an avenue to indulge their sense of being different, or unique, or misunderstood, or rebellious, blah blah. I find them curious at best, and deserving of special attention only in the way that I find it a psychological curiosity. Some people never reach adulthood.
But don’t get me wrong, males infiltrating women only spaces and endeavors is unacceptable. I am as much of a feminist as a male can be, and it’s clear that these males undermine everything that feminism has fought so hard to achieve. You can’t be for equality unless you are realistic about how biology and power dynamics between the sexes work.
Hell, I wanna see them define “gender identity” in a way that isn’t circular, or just a synonym of “personality.”
They might as well be having significant distress because of their astrological sign (and even, then which “system” of astrology are we talking about? Babylonian? Roman? Chinese? Mayan?)
not Bruce, I love my Chinese astrological sign. Somehow it seems to be fitting that I was born in the year of the rat. I have an excuse when I feel like wiggling my nose and gnawing things.
@twiliter
We’re up against consumer capitalism. Mature adults are by definition a problem.
I do admire the phrase “too yourself rather than someone else”. That condition must be responsible for about a third of worldly misery, with unequal access to resources and medical and dental ailments each accounting for about another third.
Thanks Francis, good point. I suppose growing up with the internet has been worse than growing up with TV like I was, in terms of how much consumer marketing we are bombarded with. Along with the volumes of other media and entertainment with all it’s varying degrees of value, of which most of it today seems worthless and diluted. Can anything be truly described as avant garde anymore? I don’t know how young people navigate the chaos, because I surely can’t. I don’t always want to be a mature adult either, but it’s too late for that.