Author Topic: Gender Culture  (Read 56069 times)

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Offline kimmy

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Re: Gender Culture
« Reply #45 on: June 30, 2017, 02:19:48 am »
This was posted in another thread but I thought I'd reply here:

So... my thoughts on the subject were just that... thoughts.  Based on intellectual ideas of rights and so on.  Until I read my friend's posts on her life before she changed.

Laws and economics can sometimes be ends in themselves, but they exist to make lives better overall.  Trans people have very painful lives.

I fully understand that there's a lot of hatred and violence and mistrust and fear directed towards trans people. I really do. And I support efforts to make their lives better, within reasonable limits.  I think we just have differing ideas about what might be reasonable and what might be unreasonable.

This is probably not a very good analogy, but suppose for a moment we're talking about someone confined to a wheelchair. I support making buildings and businesses accessible. I support washroom facilities with room for a wheelchair and handrails and whatever else they need. I support public facilities like gyms and pools having equipment and programs that meet the needs of a person confined to a wheelchair.   On the other hand, I wouldn't support closing a hiking trail that can't feasibly be made wheelchair-accessible.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect everything to be 100% equal.   Nothing is 100% equal.   

Banning trans women from athletics might seem unfair to trans women, but allowing physiologically male competitors to compete against biologically female competitors would be grossly unfair to the biologically female people these events were created for in the first place. There's a point at which you have to say "sorry, but no". 

Personally I feel that demanding an end to spaces for biologically female women is unfair to the people these spaces were created for in the first place.

We can't make everything 100% equal. Everybody has limits of some kind-- limits imposed by health, or finances, or religion, or physiology, or whatever.

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This is a common criticism of groups wanting equality.  The story was about a trans woman whose mate booked them a spa date, and that seems to be how it started - if that matters.
That may be how it started, but now it appears to be a group action where trans women and their allies are calling for Body Blitz to be boycotted until they admit trans women.  So again it seems while the friendly optics would be to say they're asking for access to a safe-space, it appears that there are other safe spaces available but they are demanding access to this one in particular.

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It's not to me to say the size of the victory.  I firstly ask for dialogue, and reasonable accommodation.  Peace will be achieved through those means.  Equality will happen over a much longer timeframe.

My suggestion is that closing Body Blitz or forcing it to abandon its unique format and become like other womens' gyms would actually be a victory for nobody at all. Women who enjoy the existing format lose that, and it either vanishes altogether or becomes a Spa Lady clone in a city that already has a Spa Lady and Spa Lady clones. So what does anybody gain?  I guess the Social Justice Warriors get their pound of flesh. Yay for them, I guess?

 -k
Paris - London - New York - Kim City