Step one: specify the rights
The reporting on trans issues is such a hodgepodge of incoherent language and bizarre assumptions. Reuters for instance:
Transgender minors. Transgender soldiers. Transgender characters in books.
The U.S. Supreme Court‘s latest term was bursting with fodder for America’s culture wars, few more so than three cases touching on transgender rights. The court, powered by its 6-3 conservative majority, in each case ruled against transgender plaintiffs or their interests more broadly.
But what if the putative rights are not rights in the first place? It’s not just obvious that men have a right to force themselves on women in women’s spaces provided they claim to be trans women. I, for one, don’t think they do have such a right, because if they do, then women have no right to spaces without men in them. Reuters simply pretends that choke point does not exist.
The court, which issued the final rulings of its nine-month term last Friday, agreed on Thursday to hear another major dispute involving transgender rights during its next term, which begins in October. The justices will decide the legality of Republican-backed state laws banning transgender athletes from female sports teams at public schools, taking up appeals from West Virginia and Idaho defending the measures.
Banning male athletes from female sports teams. Female athletes who are trans don’t want to play on female teams, and can’t if they do want to because taking testosterone is not permitted. It’s male (trans) athletes who want to be on female sports teams, and that is obviously unfair because of the built-in physical differences. It’s pathetic that journalists pretend not to grasp that point.
The Tennessee law upheld by the court bans gender-affirming medical treatments such as puberty blockers and hormones for people under age 18 experiencing gender dysphoria. The court’s conservatives rejected an argument that the measure unlawfully discriminated against these adolescents based on their sex or transgender status.
Gender dysphoria is the clinical diagnosis for significant distress that can result from an incongruence between a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth.
That ruling “will undoubtedly encourage opponents of LGBTQ equality to continue enacting laws that deny transgender individuals equal opportunities,” Rutgers Law School Professor Carlos Ball said.
There’s not really such a thing as “LGBTQ” equality. The Q is meaningless, so leave that aside, but the T demands rights that are not rights. It’s not a “right” for a man to say he’s a trans woman and therefore be included in women’s sports. That’s not a right and it has nothing to do with equality.
“For LGBTQ rights supporters,” Ball added, “the ruling is a reminder that most of the hard work on behalf of protecting the rights of transgender people is social and political rather than legal.”
That’s for sure. It’s social and by god it certainly is political. It takes a lot of political to undermine women’s rights while claiming to be on Team Progressive.
Reuters flat-out lies by saying that the state laws ban transgender athletes from female sports teams. They do nothing of the sort. In fact, the laws don’t mention transgender at all. The laws don’t bar female athletes with transgender identities from female sports. The laws simply bar all male athletes from female sports regardless of their gender identity, gender expression or lack thereof.
Even female athletes on T aren’t necessarily barred from female sports. The laws apply to interscholastic, intercollegiate, intramural, or club athletic teams or sports that are sponsored by any public secondary school or a state institution of higher education. Normally, only athletes at the NCAA level are subject to drug testing.
It must really frost the shorts of “non-binary” people who were “assigned female at birth” that nobody seems to be bothering to introduce laws preventing them from joining women’s teams. Nobody appears to be wringing their hands over their status in sports at all. It’s almost like their basic identity means nothing.
I am also fed up with the news media misrepresenting every legal decision protecting women and girls from men and boys as being solely about ‘trans’. I wish they’d stop it.
Also, I wish that they’d stop repeating anti-reality mantras. Human rights are for everyone – including men claiming to be ‘trans’, who nevertheless are demanding to be given special privileges to trample the boundaries of women. Nobody, including people claiming to be ‘trans’, has the right to ignore the human rights of other people. A human right to join a religion of your choosing does not give you the right to impose its strictures on people who aren’t members.
I’m quite sure that it has become such a common belief – that claiming to be a member of the opposite sex does give a person the right to ignore the human rights of others, and to terrorise them if they don’t comply – that these people see no problem with supporting Islamic terrorism, even though they themselves would be killed immediately by Hamas if they actually visited Palestine.