SCOTUS Decision: Ban on "Talk" Conversion Therapy is Unconstitutional

[smac97]

52 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

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Could you clarify if you endorse what I'll call CB's "Steps (A)-(E)" proposal?

Politics is about compromise, especially when balancing competing interests. I have no issues with CB's proposal.

Okay.

52 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Further (as I said) I have no issue restricting areas where nudity is present to people who have fully transitioned, as long as a different place is offered for people to change privately. I don't particularly care about item 5 as you quoted in your post. You will never please everyone. Some people will complain about everything. 

Indeed. But I'm curious why are you able to depart from trans orthodoxy, since the "complaining" in this context almost reflexively and necessarily includes accusations of . . . bigotry.

For example, differentiating or ranking transgender women based on their medical transition status, such as whether they have had surgeries, taken hormone replacement therapy (HRT), or transitioned at a certain age, is seen as a form of marginalization often referred to as transmedicalism or gatekeeping. Within the LGBTQ+ community and sociological discourse, creating a hierarchy based on medical intervention is widely recognized as harmful.

A summary from Google's AI:

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Why This Differentiation is Considered Bigotry

• Financial Barriers: Medical transition is highly expensive. Erasure of non-medical trans women penalizes those who cannot afford healthcare.

• Geographic and Legal Hurdles: Access to gender-affirming care varies wildly by country and state.

• Health Restrictions: Pre-existing medical conditions prevent some individuals from safely using HRT or undergoing surgery.

• Reductionist Views: Reducing womanhood strictly to medical procedures or anatomical features mimics patriarchal and essentialist definitions of gender.

• Invalidation of Identity: A person's identity is defined by their internal sense of self (gender identity), not their medical history.

 

Common Manifestations of This Bias

• "True" vs. "False" Transgender Ideology: The belief that only those who undergo full medical reassignment are valid.

• Passing Privilege: Weaponizing the ability to blend into cisnormative society against those who do not or cannot "pass."

• Systemic Gatekeeping: Legal or medical systems requiring unnecessary, invasive surgeries before updating gender markers on identification documents.

 

Moving Toward Inclusion

 

True allyship and inclusivity recognize that gender affirmation looks different for everyone. Social transition (changing names, pronouns, clothing, and hairstyles) is just as valid as medical transition. Solidarity involves fighting for the safety, autonomy, and dignity of all trans women, regardless of their medical choices or capabilities.

 

To help explore this topic further, would you like to focus on the historical origins of transmedicalism, the legal impacts of medical gatekeeping, or how to advocate for inclusive policies in the workplace or community?

 

 

I appreciate you sharing your perspective on locker rooms and other places where people are actually undressed.  You would restrict those to people who have fully medically transitioned, and you would provide a private alternative. That is a real line.

It is also a form of "gatekeeping."  That is the piece I want to flag, because it sits uneasily with how this conversation has gone.

CB's proposal openly does not treat identity as sufficient. It treats identity plus medical and other steps (physician care, a year of hormones, a doctor’s declaration, a changed ID) as the price of entry. Many advocates will reject that on principle. In that framework, a “trans woman” is a woman because she says so. Requiring hormones, surgery, or paperwork is itself treated as denying her womanhood. You said you don’t particularly care that some people will object. Fair enough. But that objection is not a fringe footnote. It is the mainstream activist claim.  

You have previously described disagreement with parts of the trans movement as "bigotry."  The difficulty is that the rule you are now willing to accept would, by that same standard, put you in the same category. Distinguishing “fully transitioned” males from males who only identify as women is the differentiation I said would draw fire. If drawing that line is bigotry when I do it, it does not become something else when the line is hormones-plus-ID rather than sex.

I am not asking you to please everyone. I am asking for a consistent standard. Either:

1. identity alone controls access (per standard trans ideology orthodoxy, such as it is or can be), in which case the proposal fails on its own terms; or
2. some objective criterion (sex, anatomy, medical status) can control access, in which case identity-as-sufficient is situated alongside my proposal (biological sex).  It is a difference in degree, not kind.

You can defend CB's version of (2). I think (2) is the only workable rule for single-sex spaces. What I resist is using “bigot” for people who hold (2), then endorsing a proposal that is also (2), just drawn at a different place. The accusation does not travel well if it applies only to the line you dislike.

If your actual position is “identity is not enough where nudity is involved, and private alternatives should exist,” please say that plainly. That is a policy argument we can discuss. It is not resolved by calling one version of gatekeeping compassionate and the other hateful.

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 16 hours ago by smac97

[Calm]

27 minutes ago, smac97 said:

orthodoxy

Got to say I laughed reading this phrase. 

[smac97]

1 hour ago, Calm said:

Got to say I laughed reading this phrase. 

I sort of struggled with it, since "trans ideology" is amorphous, and trying to define it with any particular precision is difficult.

Nonetheless, some principles seem to be fundamental to the movement (such that departure from them is generally condemned as "bigotry," "denying trans existence," etc.).  Here is what Grok generated:

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Here is a descriptive list of claims that function as load-bearing principles in much of contemporary “trans” advocacy — especially the institutional/activist version that treats dissent as bigotry or “denial of existence.” Not every trans person holds all of them. The point is which ones are treated as non-negotiable in that framework.

Core identity claims

1. Gender identity is real, innate, and authoritative. A person’s stated identity is the primary fact about whether they are a man, woman, both, or neither.
2. Identity is sex (or replaces sex for social/legal purposes). “Trans women are women” / “trans men are men” is treated as a literal truth, not a courtesy or a political slogan.
3. Self-identification is sufficient. No medical diagnosis, surgery, hormones, or even consistent presentation is required for the identity to be valid.
4. Denial of the identity is a denial of the person. Disagreeing with the identity claim is framed as saying the person “doesn’t exist,” not as disputing a proposition.

Sex, biology, and language

5. Sex is a spectrum, a social construct, or at least not a strict binary relevant to policy. Chromosomes, gametes, and reproductive anatomy are treated as crude, incomplete, or bigoted ways to classify people.
6. “Assigned sex at birth” is the preferred description of sex, implying a bureaucratic label rather than an observed reproductive category.
7. Preferred pronouns and names are morally mandatory. Using sex-based pronouns is “misgendering”; using a prior name is “deadnaming.” Both are treated as harms comparable to slurs.
8. There is no polite way to state the sex distinction. “Biological male/female,” “natal sex,” and similar terms are often classified as hate speech or dogwhistles.

Medical and youth claims

9. Gender dysphoria is validated by affirmation, not primarily explored as a possible misattribution of other distress. “Watchful waiting” or exploratory therapy is frequently labeled conversion therapy.
10. Medical transition (blockers, hormones, surgery) is healthcare, and withholding it is violence. Access is framed as lifesaving; gatekeeping is framed as cruelty.
11. Minors can have a stable, knowable transgender identity that justifies social and often medical transition. Parental or clinical caution is cast as abuse or bigotry.
12. Desistance, detransition, and comorbidity (autism, trauma, same-sex attraction, social contagion) are minimized, treated as rare, or blamed on stigma rather than on the affirmation model.

Social and institutional claims

13. Single-sex spaces, sports, prisons, and shelters must follow identity, not sex. Exclusion of males who identify as women is discrimination.
14. Any line among “trans women” is itself bigotry. Distinguishing social-only from medically transitioned, or pre-op from post-op, is “transmedicalism” or “dividing the community.”
15. Lived experience outranks data when studies, crime patterns, or fairness in sport cut against the identity rule.
16. Questions are a form of harm. Asking for definitions (“what is a woman?”), evidence, or tradeoffs is treated as bad-faith or as endangering trans people.
17. Opposition is explained as animus. The admissible motives are hatred, disgust, or religion; safety, fairness, child protection, and definitional accuracy are discounted.

Political enforcement

18. Allies must affirm publicly. Neutrality (“I don’t care what adults do privately”) is often not enough; failure to repeat the slogans is coded as hostility.
19. Conflicts with women’s rights and gay rights are denied or inverted. Sex-based rights are reframed as bigotry; same-sex attraction is pressured toward “attraction to gender identity.”
20. The category must expand, not contract. Nonbinary, genderfluid, xenogender, and similar identities are folded into the same moral protection as transsexualism; limiting the category is betrayal.

Items 3, 4, 13, and 14 are why I think CB's hormones-plus-ID rule will get condemned from inside the movement. The ideology’s public rule is not "serious medical transition." It is identity alone. Consequently, endorsing medical gatekeeping for bathrooms is departing from 3 ("Self-identification is sufficient") and 14 ("Any line among 'trans women' is itself bigotry"). In that framework, CB's departure from "orthodoxy" sure seems to be the same kind of offense he and SU have called "bigotry" when I do it.

I propose to differentiate and "gatekeep" entry into women's spaces based on biological sex, and such differentiation is "bigotry."

CB proposes to differentiate and "gatekeep" entry into women's spaces based on a fairly detailed hormones-plus-ID rule.  Is that differentiation "bigotry" too (per trans "orthodoxy")?  If not, why not?

Thanks,

-Smac

Edited 15 hours ago by smac97