Transgender bathroom use

happy jack wrote:

Thanks for clearing all that up.

No problem.  Glad I could help.  

happy jack wrote:

So, you Google 'GIPANDO laws', cite the first study that pops up...

So many questions!  

A) Did you not read the study the first time I cited it?  The study was making the rounds in the media back in September, see here, here, here, or here, though it's understandable why Fox News and National Review ignored it.

B) Do you think googling for information is inherently bad?  You seem to suggest that it is, which would explain everything.

happy jack wrote:

and pretend that you even know what this means:

Average annual crime rate in incidents per 100,000 people are in the parentheses; 90% confidence intervals are in the brackets; χ 2/2 - 1.42; ;p=0.49;
Fisher's exact = 0.658. difference-in-difference = 0.41, bootstrapped S.E. = 1.05, p = 0.699

And I give you Fisher's Exact Test, Difference in Differences, Bootstrapping, and P Values.  Common in peer reviewed statistical analyses, and found in just about every published study I've ever cited over the past 15 or so years on these forums.  I'm a decade+ out of my stats classes, and since reading as opposed to writing such studies is part of my profession, that's the best I can do.

But speaking of, C) Do you disagree with the conclusion of the analysis because it's too complicated for you?

D) Is such concrete understanding of hard data necessary for you to believe something to be real?  Like if I cited the biomedical equations from the studies that led to the development of Tylenol or chemo treatments, or the complicated equations necessary for CERN to operate or the discovery of the Higgs boson, would you suddenly doubt their effectiveness and existence, respectively?

Or E) Are you just trying to distract us from the fact that you are conclusively full of shit on this issue, in both your understanding of the related biology and psychology as well as your irrational fears of sexual predation?

happy jack wrote:

Heretic wrote:

    Or E) Are you just trying to distract us from the fact that you are conclusively full of shit on this issue, in both your understanding of the related biology and psychology as well as your irrational fears of sexual predation?

…. but as to how much statistics overall actually translate to the real world?
Kind of a different story.

Really? This study is an actual measurement of the "real world." How does that translate into "kind of a different story?"

You're simply wrong on this issue, jack. There's no shame in being wrong. None of us are perfect. None of us know everything, or are right 100% of the time.

Time to accept it and move on.

Your "example" is totally absurd.  Twenty percent is a frickin' huge number, and very statistically significant.  Quite a contrast with the studies provided by Heretic...

happy jack wrote:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/health/nearly-1-in-5-women-in-us-survey-report-sexual-assault.html

Nearly 1 in 5 Women in U.S. Survey Say They Have Been Sexually Assaulted

And how many in that survey said they'd been assaulted in bathrooms by men in dresses taking advantage of the relevant bathroom laws?

You're making my point for me.

And for what it's worth, there's more up to date and accurate statistics here: https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics

Still no mythical, cross dressing, bathroom rapists though.

It's almost as if they don't exist.  

And don't for a fucking minute pretend you actually give a shit, happy.  That statistic is exactly why we have the Violence Against Women Act, which, despite what it does, you're still somehow against, remember?  And you'd have zero trouble condemning any of those women to death while forcing them, children even, to carry their rape baby to term.

Thank goodness for the magnanimous tolerance of the Left, and for their respect for the right to speak freely and practice one's religion.
All this, for merely abstaining?!?!
What if she had actually voted against the resolution?
Drawing and quartering?
Fucking assholes.


https://www.dailywire.com/news/38267/berkeley-christian-student-senator-pressured-kassy-dillon

Berkeley Student Senator Pressured To Resign For Abstaining From Vote For Religious Beliefs

"I pray that the Lord would use my story to shed light on how the church can better love the LGBTQ+ community while not compromising His truth spoken in love."

By Kassy Dillon

November 12, 2018

A Christian student senator at the University of California, Berkeley, is being ousted from her position after abstaining from a resolution that condemns the Trump administration for considering narrowing the definition of gender.
The resolution was introduced on October 31, and in response, Isabella Chow gave a statement explaining why she could not vote on the resolution because of her Christian beliefs.
“My God is one who assigns immeasurable value to and desires to love each and every human being. In God’s eyes and therefore my own, everyone of you here today and in the LGBTQ+ community as a whole is significant, valid, wanted, and loved — even if and when our views differ,” Chow said.

“That said, I cannot vote for this bill without compromising my values and my responsibility to the community that elected me to represent them,” Chow continued. “As a Christian, I personally do believe that certain acts and lifestyles conflict with what is good, right, and true. I believe that God created male and female at the beginning of time, and designed sex for marriage between one man and one woman. For me, to love another person does not mean that I silently concur when, at the bottom of my heart, I do not believe that your choices are right or the best for you as an individual.”
“After lengthy conversations with many of my community leaders and advisors, I have chosen to abstain from voting on these bills tonight,” she added.
According to Campus Reform, the resolution condemned the proposed Title IX changes that include limiting “gender identity” to physical sex. The proposed changes were mentioned in a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services which outlines a legal definition to sex under Title IX.
After her statement, Student Action, the party of which Chow was a member, cut ties with her, claiming that there are “inconsistencies between her beliefs” and the party, including perspectives on “reproductive health and wellness resources, legal protections for survivors of sexual violence, and community space for vulnerable members of our student body.”
Teddy Lake, the student senator who introduced the resolution, condemned Chow and proceeded to label her as a bigot in a statement.
“Tonight was a harrowing reminder of the kind of bigotry that persists in contemporary society and, more specifically, sits across from me on the Senate floor,” Lake wrote.
“I cannot fathom the amount of cognitive dissonance required to make a statement as disingenuous and harmful as the one Senator Chow made tonight,” Lake added. “The contradictions present in her speech are, frankly, disturbing and irreconcilable. Perhaps what most offends me, though, is Senator Chow’s outrageous ask that we, as a Senate class, respect her “beliefs” as she does ours. To that end, I’d like to clarify that what Senator Chow expressed tonight were not beliefs at all — they were hateful prejudices that deserve nothing less than the strongest condemnation from myself, my community, and my colleagues. I have no obligation to entertain or engage with individuals who deny my right to exist loudly and proudly as a member of the LGBTQ+ community.”

Chow attempted to defend herself by sending an op-ed to the school’s newspaper, the Daily Cal, but was rejected because it “reinforces” her original statement which they deemed “utilized rhetoric that is homophobic and transphobic by the Daily Cal’s standards,” Campus Reform reports. She also attempted to edit her piece to comply with the standards of the Daily Cal but was still rejected because “the submission as a whole doesn’t meet the newspaper’s editorial standards.” The paper referred to its submission page on its website that claims, “Op-eds that are deemed libelous, racist, sexist, homophobic, or highly offensive in any other manner will not print.”
The school’s Queer Alliance Resource Center (QARC) also condemned Chow and called for her resignation.
At the Senate meeting last week, hundreds of students protested Chow and even had a large banner that said, “Senator Chow Resign now.”
Chow told The Daily Wire that she has faced criticism before for being pro-life but she was not expecting “such a concerted and targeted attack.”

“Over the past couple of days, I’ve learned a lot about the viciousness of online harassment. If people want to attack me, it’s much easier for them to whip out their phones and tweet a scathing remark that will gain likes, comments, and reshares,” Chow said. “It takes a lot more courage to send me a personal message or email with direct threats or insults, and even more courage to look me in the eye and say the same slurs that they so casually use on social media. Even though vocal opponents have largely avoided me on campus and in personal communication, it doesn’t mitigate the pain of hurtful words that I see on social media every day.”
Chow said she stands by her comments and does not plan to resign.
Chow has also been voted out of the Publications and Media Board without being granted a meeting to defend herself. “I’ve also been disaffiliated with pretty much every publications/media club on campus, almost all without a heads up or before I had the chance to speak with club leaders that I’ve worked so long with.”

Chow also provided The Daily Wire with the following statement:
For me and the church here at Berkeley, free speech is an issue that has been highlighted, but it's not the primary issue at stake here. As one of my staffers put it, this is "people issue" – people who feel hurt and unable to reconcile how the traditional Christian worldview can profess to love LGBTQ+ individuals while disagreeing with their lifestyles and the promotion of their identities. Even if the church continues to be misunderstood and slandered, our responsibility is not to shout our beliefs loudly above the noise, but to emulate the unconditional love and truth of Jesus.
As tumultuous as the past couple weeks have been for me, my deepest prayer is that the church in Berkeley and beyond would increase dialogue regarding the intersection of faith and the LGBTQ+ community. We do not have to agree 100% theologically or practically, but must recognize that the LGBTQ+ community has been shunned and hurt by the church for too long. I recognize that behind all the anger and backlash are wounded hearts and traumatic narratives that only God can redeem. I pray that the Lord would use my story to shed light on how the church can better love the LGBTQ+ community while not compromising His truth spoken in love.

happy jack wrote:

Have you considered maybe breaking the pills in half?

Have you considered offering an honest and factual rebuttal? Or at the very least, considered being intellectually consistent?  

Just to reiterate:

I wrote:

And how many in that survey said they'd been assaulted in bathrooms by men in dresses taking advantage of the relevant bathroom laws?

We'll wait.

happy jack wrote:

Berkeley Student Senator Pressured To Resign For Abstaining From Vote For Religious Beliefs

So, just to be clear, if this was a religious objection to miscegenation, you'd be totes on board, right?  Because "sincerely held beliefs" or whatever?

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/11/21/god-gender-neutral-archbishop-canterbury/

God is gender neutral, says the Archbishop of Canterbury

Josh Jackman

21st November 2018, 7:52 PM

God is a gender neutral being, according to Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.
During a lecture on Wednesday (November 21) at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in London’s Trafalgar Square, the Archbishop responded to an attendee who asked about God as a father by saying that “God is not male or female,” according to The Times.
 Welby, who said last year that boys wearing dresses to school was “not a problem,” explained that “all human language about God is inadequate and to some degree metaphorical.
God is gender neutral in Catholicism and Protestantism, despite male depictions (Public Domain)
“We can’t pin God down”
— Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby
“God is not a father in exactly the same way as a human being is a father. God is not male or female. God is not definable,” continued the Archbishop.
“It is extraordinarily important as Christians that we remember that the definitive revelation of who God is was not in words, but in the word of God who we call Jesus Christ. We can’t pin God down.”
Is God gender neutral in Christianity?
Both the Protestant and Catholic Churches already approve of this gender neutral way of viewing God.
In the Church of England’s guiding Articles of Religion, a document which dates back to 1562, God is defined as being “without body, parts, or passions.”
This description portrays God as a gender neutral being—as well as one without a sexuality—in a uniformly positive way, going on in the same sentence to praise the deity’s “wisdom and goodness.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury said that “God is not male or female. God is not definable” (Jack Taylor/Getty)
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that God can be compared to a father or a mother, but should not be seen as literally being either.
“God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood,” it reads, before warning that “human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood.
“We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God.
“He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard: no-one is father as God is Father.”
Clergy and celebrities agree: God is not male
Ariana Grande released her song “God Is a Woman” earlier this year
Last year, the Church of Sweden advised its clergy to stop referring to God with male pronouns.
Sweden’s national church, an Evangelical Lutheran denomination, made the switch as part of a modernisation push which called on leaders to drop male identifiers such as “he,” “Father” and “the Lord.”
Instead of using the phrase “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” during church services, clergy were urged to say: “God and the Holy Trinity.”
US pop sensation Ariana Grande also addressed the gender imbalance in the way that many religions see God as male by releasing her song “God Is a Woman” earlier this year, with a video that featured Madonna playing the part of God.



So, apparently, He can use any bathroom He wants, because "Clergy and celebrities agree".
Thank God.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/palace-weighs-reports-meghan-harry-160000726.html

The Palace Weighs In On Reports Meghan & Harry Will Raise A Gender Fluid Child

Alejandra Salazar
March 2, 2019

In her short time as a royal, Meghan Markle has been celebrated for her refreshingly progressive thinking — but when it comes to Baby Sussex, the palace is determined to keep it old school.
Kensington Palace had a busy week shutting down reports that Markle and Prince Harry intend to raise their baby without imposing any gender stereotypes. The rumors of the royal couple’s parenting style of choice stem from a recent Vanity Fair report, which quoted an anonymous source saying, “Meghan has been talking to some of her friends about the birth and how she and Harry plan to raise their baby. Her exact word was fluid...She said they plan to raise their child with a fluid approach to gender and they won’t be imposing any stereotypes.

”The palace’s response was swift: “This story is totally false,” a spokesperson told Hello! magazine just days after the article went live.

………

I am betting that they are going to come under fire for daring to raise a normal child (if they haven't already).
Any takers?

https://apnews.com/b5e7bb73c6134d58a0df9e1cee2fb8ad

Blurred lines: A pregnant man’s tragedy tests gender notions

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE

When the man arrived at the hospital with severe abdominal pains, a nurse didn’t consider it an emergency, noting that he was obese and had stopped taking blood pressure medicines. In reality, he was pregnant — a transgender man in labor that was about to end in a stillbirth.
The tragic case, described in Wednesday’s New England Journal of Medicine, points to larger issues about assigning labels or making assumptions in a society increasingly confronting gender variations in sports , entertainment and government . In medicine, there’s a similar danger of missing diseases such as sickle cell and cystic fibrosis that largely affect specific racial groups, the authors write.

………

The Liberal idea of progressivism and social justice.
At what point will you admit that some of your ideas are unremittingly, and irrevocably, crazy?

And this, Lefties, is another example of why many of your policies do not deserve to be given even a minimum amount of serious consideration by thinking individuals.
Assholes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/transgender-ideology-hurts-girls-sports-undermines-feminism/

The High School Fighting to Save Women’s Sports
By Alexandra DeSanctis

July 12, 2019 6:30 AM


As athletic conferences embrace radical new policies, female athletes lose opportunities to compete fairly.

Three young female track athletes in Connecticut have submitted a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, asking for an investigation of allegedly illegal Title IX discrimination against them. Due to a Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) policy allowing biological males who identify as women to compete in girls’ sports, these young women — along with many of their fellow female athletes, they say — have been deprived of opportunities to win competitions, and even to qualify for competition in the first place.


Meanwhile, just last month, the Catholic, all-girls middle and high school from which I graduated announced that it would withdraw from the Potomac Valley Athletic Conference (PVAC) in the District of Columbia area after the conference adopted a policy like the CIAC’s, allowing students to compete in sports according to gender identity rather than biological sex.
For Oakcrest School, the choice to leave the conference was made regretfully, and not on the basis of Catholic teaching about human sexuality, though upholding the school’s mission was at the heart of the decision. “The safety-and-fairness issue for us was the biggest,” Miriam Buono, an administrator at Oakcrest, tells National Review in a phone interview. “Our mission is deeply rooted in the natural law and the teaching of the Catholic Church, and certainly we really understand that girls are girls and boys are boys, and that’s a beautiful thing. But we weren’t going to impose our mission on other schools.”
When Oakcrest made a case to the PVAC in opposition to the proposed policy change, it was based not on Catholic beliefs about progressive gender ideology but on concern for the safety and success of its students.


“We went with a very logical, science-based approach, which was safety and fairness,” Buono adds. “We were the only all-girls school in the PVAC at the time. We felt that it was really important for us to advocate for safety and fairness on the playing field for our girls, and for any girls playing.”


Despite the obvious flaws with these sorts of policies, Oakcrest’s concerns weren’t enough to sway the athletic directors in the PVAC, who voted to advance the progressive agenda at the expense of female athletes. Buono says the school already has ensured that its students will have as many opportunities as possible to continue competing against local schools, but because of this policy change, Oakcrest students no longer can compete for titles within a conference, undoubtedly a loss.
The sorts of concerns Oakcrest articulated are far from unfounded, and they are in no way motivated by animus toward individuals who identify as the opposite sex. As much as transgender activists insist otherwise, sex is a biological reality that carries with it a number of concrete practical effects. Policies that address those realities don’t exist to deny or affirm individuals’ self-identification. Having separate bathrooms and locker rooms for men and women — not to mention separate sports teams — is based on real bodily differences rather than on personal conceptions of “gender identity.”


The safety of female wrestlers, for instance, is implicated when biological males enter their competitions, regardless of whether those males identify as women. It isn’t discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” for those young women to want to avoid wrestling biological males, whether owing to physical-safety concerns or to a desire for a fair competition. It isn’t discrimination for students and parents to want sex-segregated restrooms and locker rooms for the sake of safety and privacy.


Even in non-contact sports where concerns about physical safety are less immediate, fairness matters, and student athletes shouldn’t be accused of discrimination when they want to preserve their ability to compete and succeed. The current record-holder for the entire U.S. in the women’s 55-meter run is a biological male, who is permitted by the NCAA’s transgender-athlete policy to compete against women. In Connecticut, female track competitions at the high-school level have been thrown into disarray across the whole state because of the participation of only two biologically male athletes who identify as women.


According to the complaint filed by Alliance Defending Freedom, those two males “have taken 15 women’s state championship titles (titles held in 2016 by ten different Connecticut girls) and have taken more than 40 opportunities to participate in higher level competitions from female track athletes in the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons alone.” Regardless of one’s opinions on how best to treat gender dysphoria or accommodate those who identify as transgender, this policy is evidently unfair to young women.
Perhaps surprisingly, groups that consider themselves supportive of feminist goals have not rushed to the defense of female athletes. The ACLU, for example, has taken the position that “banning trans girls [biological males] from school sports is neither feminist nor legal” — even though no one is proposing to ban these athletes from competition. When tennis champion and LGBT activist Martina Navratilova wrote that “letting men compete as women simply if they change their name and take hormones is unfair,” her former allies condemned and disavowed her. (It is worth noting that the CIAC policy doesn’t even require men to take testosterone-suppressing hormones at all in order to compete against women; mere self-identification is the only criterion.)


The increasingly intersectional Left seems unwilling to wrestle with the inherent tension between transgender ideology and feminism: How can they decry the patriarchy even as they declare that men can now be women? And how can a movement claim to value the unique role and contributions of women while insisting that “being a woman” is essentially indefinable?


As many on the left demand that anti-discrimination policies be amended to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories, the fate of female sports should be in the front of our minds. For female track runners in Connecticut and female athletes at Oakcrest — and young women like them across the country — we need to preserve spaces to compete and excel safely and fairly.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/canadas-ball-waxing-horror-show-peak-transgen-activism/eview

PC Culture
Canada’s Ball-Waxing Horror Show Is Peak Transgender Activism

By Madeleine Kearns

July 23, 2019 6:30 AMA Canadian man is attempting to legally coerce women to wax his scrotum.

Imagine this. It’s 1990. A feminist novelist is pitching her latest book to a publisher. Set in a dystopian future in which a tyrannical ideology has gripped Western politics, it features female estheticians who have been dragged before a national kangaroo court for refusing to wax a man’s genitals. The publisher worries that the story, about an outrageous affront on women’s rights, isn’t plausible. She suggests something more realistic — how about fascistic men who force women into reproductive slavery instead?

Well, it’s 2019. The Handmaid’s Tale is still fiction. While Wax My Balls, B**** is a real-life horror show.
This week, British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal (CHRC) — a self-described “quasi-judicial body created by the B.C. Human Rights Code” — held hearings on whether or not female beauticians should be forced to handle male genitalia. The complainant, known until Wednesday under the alias “J. Y.” owing to a court gag order, is Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv, a self-identified transgender woman.
Yaniv has filed 16 different complaints against estheticians in the past year. Yaniv argues that, as a transgender woman, being denied services on account of her gender identity was discriminatory. As “Jessica,” Yaniv explained on Twitter:
This is not about waxing. This about businesses and individuals using their religion and culture to refuse service to protected groups because -they- don’t agree with it or the person and use that to illegally discriminate contrary to the BC Human Rights Code and the CHRC.
But who said this was about waxing? This about sex, surely. Yaniv is male — a male who has not made the surgical commitment necessary to pass as a female. On top of that, in the past year, Yaniv has presented unambiguously as a male on a number of sites including Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. And on top of that, Yaniv is a male who is sexually attracted to females.
For the women who declined to wax Yaniv’s private parts, however, the matter was simpler still. Yaniv has male genitalia. Some preferred not to touch these for religious reasons. Others, such as business owner Marcia Da Silva, didn’t feel comfortable or qualified. In the hearing, Da Silva’s lawyer, Jay Cameron, further explained that forcing his client to touch Yaniv’s scrotum would effectively be coercing “intimate services.”

It gets worse. The Canadian journalist Meghan Murphy, who was banned from Twitter for identifying Yaniv as a man, writes at Spectator USA:
In some cases, Yaniv, who is male and maintains male genitalia, used fake Facebook profiles, displaying photos of women (in at least one case, he used the profile of a pregnant woman) to request the service via Facebook Marketplace. When the aestheticians realized he was male, they told him they only performed the service for women (indeed, waxing male genitals is an entirely different procedure, which requires particular training and wax). Yaniv went so far as to tell Sandeep Banipal, proprietor of Blue Heaven Beauty Lounge, that he was on his period, and asked if she could work around the string.
The damages to these women have been considerable, including stress and depression; at least one woman was forced to close her business. Another, a single mother who worked out of her home, paid Yaniv $2,500 to withdraw the complaint so that she could escape the expense of further litigation. Some of the women Yaniv targeted were immigrants. And as if there weren’t enough reasons to be suspicious of Yaniv, some of his comments on social media have seemed strikingly xenophobic. On Facebook, as “Jonathan,” Yaniv posted:
We have a lot of immigrants here who gawk, judge and aren’t the cleanest of people, they’re also verbally and physically abusive, that’s one reason I joined a girl’s gym, cause I DON’T want issues with these people . . . They lie about sh[**], they’ll do anything to support their own kind and make things miserable for everyone else.
It gets worse still. Yaniv is also “seeking permission” from a Canadian local council “to hold three ‘topless’ swims for people ages 12 and up, and parents would be barred from attending,”the Daily Caller reports. This swim would be for children who identify as LGBTQ2S+ and would include topless girls.
So there we have it. An obviously predatory male is attempting to use the force of law to coerce females to touch his private parts and — unbelievably — a Canadian human-rights tribunal is entertaining this demand. Yaniv has so perfectly exposed the absurdity of gender policies that it would scarcely be surprising if he turned out to be a troll.



The transgendered merely want to be treated equally. Despite the panicked outcry from those who would object, nothing like the above could ever possibly happen.
Could it?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jacobtobia/how-to-talk-to-your-kids-about-gender-nonconformity?fbclid=IwAR3fStfgMLUhE2cOfrAgx-C549FgFjOomDF52j39gX0dWQQBxq1O4XoTFP0

A Letter To Parents Whose Children Stare At Me In Public
Or, How to Talk to Your Kids About Gender-Nonconforming People

Posted on March 26, 2018, at 9:46 a.m.

Jacob Tobia

Dear Parents of America or Anywhere Else: As a gender-nonconforming person, I get a lot of attention — both wanted and unwanted — anytime I walk around in public.

It ranges from people laughing at me, verbally assaulting me, or taking my picture without my consent, to people stopping me mid-strut to exclaim “Oh my god, I love your outfit,” or inquiring “WHERE is that lipstick from?!?”

But one type of attention stands out above the rest: the attention of confused children. I first started noticing it when I moved to New York City at the age of 22.

Children would see me on the subway sporting my beard and lipstick and wouldn’t quite know how to react. They’d wear their confusion, marvel, or pleasant surprise at my gender expression blatantly on their sleeves. Children are anything but subtle about their interest when it is piqued.

I was reminded of this attention again the other weekend, when I traveled from Los Angeles to Florida for a queer conference at the Orlando Hilton resort.
Half of the hotel was filled with queers trying to learn how to better serve trans youth; the other half was filled with nuclear families who’d come to Orlando to meet Minnie and Elsa and Goofy at Disney World. It made for an interesting combination.

After my keynote speech, sporting a bold purple lip, swim trunks, and a bathrobe, I made my way to the hotel’s lazy river. That’s when I noticed the familiar eyes following me; the kids were back at it, blatantly staring at me to their heart’s content.

They’d never seen someone like me back home in Michigan or Spokane or Wichita. Some kids gawked quietly, others startled in fright, still others giggled in a curious, empathetic way.

But the most common reaction was that your children, upon noticing my gender expression, turned to you and exclaimed something like, “Mommy, that boy is wearing lipstick!” or “Look, Dad! Look at what he’s wearing!”

After your kids called your attention to my gender expression, you all did pretty much the same thing. You looked my way, made eye contact with me, became swiftly embarrassed yourselves, and told your kids that “It’s not nice to talk about strangers.”
Your kids, upon seeing your embarrassment at the situation, turned away, became embarrassed *themselves*, and, after a few minutes’ recovery from the shame of it all, resumed splashing around in the pool. This interaction played out dozens of times over the course of my weekend in Orlando.

Parents, I’ve decided that we need to have a little chat, because you can do better than that. You have to do better. You owe it to me, to the trans community, and to your kids’ emotional development to do better.

It starts with admitting that, while it may have seemed that the interaction was only about teaching your children not to talk about strangers, there was something much more fundamental at stake.

In reality, when your child turned to you and said “Look, that boy is wearing lipstick!” what they were really doing was asking a question.

Beneath every observation of difference is an implied question about whether or not that difference is acceptable. So when your child commented on the fact that they saw a boy wearing lipstick, what they were really asking was, “Mom/Dad/Parental Unit, is it okay for boys to wear lipstick? Is what that person’s doing acceptable?”

When you turned to your child and awkwardly said “It’s not nice to talk about strangers,” you not only didn’t answer their question, you effectively shut down what could’ve been a productive and affirming conversation.
You took a moment when your child could’ve learned an important lesson about how to respect the broad diversity of gender expression, and reduced it to a tangential and less important lesson about manners in public. Furthermore, by demonstrating your own discomfort with the situation, you made your kids uncomfortable too — inadvertently furthering the culture of stigma and discomfort that surrounds gender-nonconforming people.

Parents of the world, I’d like to suggest a better paradigm for handling this situation when it inevitably arises again. The next time your child turns to you and says, “Look! That boy is wearing lipstick!” or “That girl is wearing a bowtie!” don’t shut down the conversation by telling them not to talk about strangers.

Instead, try answering the question that they’re really asking; try talking to them about the beautiful diversity of gender expression in our world.

I promise it’s not that hard. You could say “Yes, Johnny, sometimes boys do wear lipstick and that is perfectly okay. You can wear lipstick too if you want!” Or you could say, “Why yes, Sarah, she is wearing a bowtie. Girls and boys can both wear bowties. Would you like one?”
Or, if your child is a savant, you could even say “Yes, Tabitha. While we are often presented with the myopic notion that gender is biological in nature, it’s actually a socially constructed, performative/discursive system that creates hegemonic power within society and varies across cultures, time, and anthropological space. You’ll learn all about that when you go to college on a full scholarship, become a gender studies major, and read Judith Butler and Michel Foucault en route to writing your thesis!”

And for the love of god, no matter what response you choose, please don’t be awkward about it.

Children can smell parental discomfort from a million miles away. If you show your children that you’re uncomfortable when confronted with a gender-nonconforming person like me, then your children will learn to mirror that behavior. And that’s not okay.

Just be cool, alright? Is that really so much to ask?
Any one of these responses (particularly the last one) not only answers the question that your child is really asking you, it also teaches your child, early on, to respect the natural diversity of gender in our world. Equally importantly, it opens up new possibilities for your child to lovingly explore their own gender identity in years to come.

So, parents, while it may be rude to talk about strangers, I’m gonna go ahead and give your kids a pass. I am fine with your children talking about me in public, as long as you’re willing to talk about me in public too.

The next time you see me standing on the subway in a pair of heels or strutting poolside in a purple lip and your child says something about it, I give you full permission to use me as a teaching opportunity.

Feel free to talk about me all you want. Feel free to tell your kids all about the beautiful rainbow of gender that is this world. Feel free to tell them that they can be whoever they want to be and express their gender in whatever way makes them happiest. You have my enthusiastic consent, my affirmative permission, to do so.

P.S. If you do feel guilty using my existence as a teachable moment about gender, I will accept compensation in the form of day passes to Disney World. I never got to ride Space Mountain as a kid, so.
P.P.S. I will also accept free drinks from the pool bar.




I have a much better idea: rather than place the burden on these parents, how about you stop going out in public looking like a fucking freak?
Problem solved.

https://babylonbee.com/news/man-identified-m1-abrams-tank-killed-action

Man Who Identified As M1 Abrams Tank Killed In Action

January 10th, 2018

AFGHANISTAN—Sergeant Bruce Larson, 28, was deployed to Afghanistan as part of a mechanized Army combat unit in the fall, after informing his superiors that he self-identified as an M1A1 Abrams tank.
Tragically, the man was killed in his first combat engagement over the weekend.
After being ordered to flank an enemy position, Larson crested a hill, making tank noises and yelling, “BOOM!” as he fired his imaginary 105mm gun at Taliban forces. Confused enemy soldiers watched him from a distance as he continued to lay down “suppressing fire” by making loud “pew pew pew” noises with his mouth, which he identifies as his .50-caliber secondary armament.
Finally, the bewildered Taliban forces shot at him, according to an Army debriefing. Sadly, although the man identified as the advanced modern combat vehicle, the bullets shot at him from an enemy combatant’s AK-47 did not agree with his perception of reality, and he tragically lost his life, according to sources.
The man was not buried but was scrapped for parts at a U.S. Army scrapyard, per his wishes. He is survived by his wife, who identifies as an F-22 Raptor.

Stupid is as stupid does.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/air-canada-wont-greet-passengers-as-ladies-and-gentlemen-in-recognition-of-gender-fluidity

Air Canada Won’t Greet Passengers As ‘Ladies’ And ‘Gentlemen’ In Recognition Of Gender Fluidity

By  Emily Zanotti
DailyWire.com

Air Canada will no longer allow its flight attendants, pilots, and airport gate staff to greet passengers as “ladies” and “gentlemen” in recognition of “gender fluidity,” the airline announced Monday.

Fox News reports that the airline is making the change as part of a company-wide commitment to be more welcoming to those who don’t strictly identify as either male or female.

The change will mostly affect on-board announcements made over the public address system and boarding announcements made in the gate areas of Air Canada’s hub airports. Employees will now use the simple “everyone” or “tout le monde” (the airline is bilingual to serve residents of Quebec).
“We will be amending our onboard announcements to modernize them and remove specific references to gender,” the company said in a statement. “We work hard to make sure all employees feel like valued members of the Air Canada family, while ensuring our customers are comfortable and respected when they choose to travel with us.”

Canada has been on the forefront of recognizing extra gender options — protections for gender identify are codified in Canada’s criminal code even as protections for fundamental rights, like the freedom of speech, remain largely unacknowledged, and the country’s national government has encouraged Canadian provinces to offer third, non-binary gender options (an “X” in the box labeled “gender”) for official documents like birth certificates. The central Canadian government offers “gender X” on passports.
Air Canada is, apparently, only following its country’s lead in adopting a social justice-oriented view towards their customers. They quickly received accolades from the far left for their compassionate and woke approach to gender.

“@AirCanada will swap ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ in its flight announcements with ‘Hello everyone’, ensuring gender neutrality. Big win for inclusion!#LGBTQ,” wrote one Twitter user.
“I hear Air Canada is moving towards addressing its passengers in a more gender-neutral way, replacing ‘ladies and gentlemen’ with ‘everyone.’ This. Is. Good,” wrote another.
Unfortunately for the air travel provider, it’s impossible to be woke enough for everyone on the progressive Left, and just as the airline was likely getting used to being heaped with accolades for its forward thinking, they were hit from the Left with criticism over their decision to be less formal when encountering customers.
“So those who appreciate being reffered to as per there gender dont count anymore?” one social media commentator quipped.
“Whoever in the top brass at @AirCanada approved of removing ‘ladies and gentlemen’ from the greeting … congrats for lowering the class of your experience. Formal titles that make people feel appreciated is not assuming gender. Soon we’ll just end up as numbers,” complained another.
Others complained that the move didn’t go far enough, and that merely changing policy is pointless if the change doesn’t also apply to the company’s very DNA and come from an organic decision to alter corporate attitudes: “It’s totally fine to announce ‘Hello everyone’ and totally ridiculous to claim this announcement is to ensure gender neutrality. Inclusion should be embedded in behaviour, not paraded around for PR points.”