To what extent should transgendered people should have access to restrooms? To what extent should they be allowed to participate in sports? Why guess. Here are YouGov's survey results from the UK:
Such a great question by Rebecca Makkai on Twitter. Such hilarious answers (follow the link . . . )
That is to say: Stop using “male” and “female” to refer to men and women. In fact, stop using sex-based words to refer to people at all. They’re words for bodies, not for people with hearts and souls and minds.I suppose we're going to need to scrub these offending terms from thousands of years of literature worldwide. Good-bye Shakespeare. Good-bye, The Bible. Good-bye biology and anatomy texts. And we'll need to erase the recordings to thousands of offensive songs, such as "Brown Eyed Girl" and everything ever recorded by the Beach Boys.
I've been struggling to understand the contours of the recent dispute involving J.K.Rowling's tweets regarding transgendered persons. This issue caught my interest in that I know several people who transitioned and one who is transitioning as a 30 year old adult after being in a marriage. In the process of trying to understand the issues, I've read about a dozen articles from varying perspectives plus hundreds of tweets, many of them claiming to be authored by transgendered persons.
Interestingly, those postings claiming to be authored by transgendered persons seem to be much more sympathetic to J.K. Rowling. Many of the postings on social media are intense reads, leading me to wonder whether there is any way to satisfy all of the sides to the dispute. I doubt it and I think I now better understand why after watching the attached video featuring two evolutionary biologists, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. I found their comments on gender ideology and biology quite helpful to understanding these issues. I especially appreciate that their comments are well founded on biology, but also sensitive to the need to treat transgendered persons with kindness. I also appreciate that they both deal head-on with the political aspects of this issue, including the need to recognize over-stepping by the authoritarian left.
I sometimes ponder how many things had to happen in order for me to exist. There are countless things that happen on this planet every day, of course, but some of these things absolutely positively had to happen in order for me (and you) to exist. In this post, I will discuss a few of these contingencies that had to happen in order for you to be reading this post. This is a tale permeated with sex and violence.
The correct egg needed to meet the correct sperm or else we wouldn't have been born. Given that there are more than 40 million sperm in each ejaculation, it was almost mathematically impossible for the "correct" sperm to get to my mother's egg on the "correct" day. But for that sperm and egg to have met, my parents needed to meet. And they needed to court each other in such a way that they, to at least some minimal degree, liked each other on the "correct" evening.