Joe Biden started off his presidency with a bang on Wednesday, signing more than a dozen executive orders unwinding some of the terrible policies Trump foisted on the country, on issues ranging from COVID to climate change to trans rights.
It’s that last one that’s got the TERFs in a tizzy. The executive order in question, as the New York Times put it,
reinforces Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to require that the federal government does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, a policy that reverses action by Mr. Trump’s administration.
Jezebel had this to add:
Meant to tackle “discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation,” Biden’s executive order essentially calls on federal agencies to broadly apply last year’s landmark Bostock ruling, which expanded the definition of sex discrimination to include discrimination based on sexual orientation as well as gender identity. Notably, the executive order included the line, “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” and stated that Bostock should also apply to Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination in federally funded schools.
On Twitter, TERFs and assorted other transphobes quickly got a hashtag going, claiming that Biden had somehow “erased women” with the executive order extending basic rights to trans people. I couldn’t find anyone in the hashtag explaining clearly how giving trans people basic protections is a blow to so-called “real women.”
Some were a good deal less polite:
The hashtag also attracted a veritable army of trolls and reactionaries who weren’t so careful about hiding their transphobia — or their homophobic, or their racism.
Some criticized Biden for giving in to “wokeness,” a favorite right-wing epithet for anything vaguely progressive.
Happily, though, the hashtag was quickly overwhelmed with rebuttals of TERF illogic and celebrations of trans rights. By the time I got to the hashtag this afternoon, there were perhaps three pro-trans tweets for every bigoted one.
But in some ways the most heartening tweet was this one:
Celebrate this victory; fuck the haters.
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okay first terfs, this has nothing to do with “adult human females” because he made it very clear this is for underage CHILDREN in classes not being denied from things like a restroom, locker room and sports room. This is not erasing Adult women because it has nothing to do with adult women but trans girls and trans boys who need to have their right to live their truths respected in ever aspect of their lives. If an adult human woman is trying to get into a child’s locker room when she is not A. a parent of a child at that school, b a facility going there to clean/ other business, or C, not there for any emergency thing like a school shooting or attempted suicided, then she has no reason or right to be going into a space where CHILDREN can be undressed.
Second if your life is so meaningless that Sam who used to be sally can now play on the boys wrestling team instead of the girls then you need to get a life.
I saw this hashtag earlier today and was able to bear witness to both the dregs of humanity and also the rebuttals. Of course, the thing most transphobes missed was that Biden’s executive order for the most part reinforces something that already was law. Meanwhile, I saw a significant number who were openly admitting they’d rather have Trump as president because they’d give up abortion rights to own the trans. It’s frustrating, but at least now they’re revealing their true colors to the world.
Because of course the president has nothing better to do than read transphobic screeds on a hashtag based around a deliberate misinterpretation.
When you definitely care about equality for women.
Apparently cis women born without uteruses and/or ovaries aren’t women now.
Also, is it just me or does the bit about “nature’s perfection” sound hella creepy?
I swear this is the kind of stuff that makes my blood boil the most, adults wanting to hurt kids. And then these fuckers want to claim their the victim when they hurt the children. Growing up is hard enough, you don’t need a bunch of fucking adults telling you that your exist erases them and hurts other people!
@naglfar
It’s super fucking creepy. It tells you that they see any female bodied person as a walking womb and tits and pretend that it’s not misogyny. I’m sure they would have some equally creepy fucking things to say to trans boys/ men. Probably along the lines about how they “ruined” their perfect little baby making bodies by transitioning. I can’t stand transphobes. they make me so angry and I’m not even trans!
@Elaine
I’ve heard transphobes masquerading as feminists actually say that to trans guys and AFAB non-binary people. Similarly, their obsession with “healthy breasts” being removed.
@naglfar
I bet it’s the same type of people that buy those “save the titties” type shirts when it comes to breast cancer. Like the whole person doesn’t matter if they survive having cancer if they lose their breast in the process. Nope, just the tits. Bet they have no problem against implants though, you know, a surgery that makes it so someone can’t breast feed if they have a baby.
They also have way to much of an obsession about trans kids genitals. It’s disgusting.
Even were this true, which I doubt, isn’t the solution obvious? Get rid of sex segregation in sports altogether and replace it with some form of weight class divisions in each of which the playing field is approximately level, determined by muscle mass or other objective criteria measured by doctors knowledgeable in sports medicine.
Meanwhile, it’s odd to see someone supposedly enamored with women’s rights explicitly lamenting the perceived eroding of a system of segregation. I don’t recall ever seeing a civil rights activist oppose desegregation in the 70s. It’s almost as if the TERFs making these arguments are actually just traditionalists defending the status quo because they have achieved a fairly good position under said status quo (more commonly known as “conservatives”) and their arguments about rights are in bad faith or something!
Change that to “Bye, bye ‘colored only’ drinking fountains” and it doesn’t sound so bad, does it, unless maybe to someone who sometimes wears a Klan hood.
Hello women maybe being able to attain the same status (and money) that men do in baseball, football, etc. etc. etc. someday soon … Scary thought, if you’re heavily invested in the status quo, or your masculinity is terribly fragile to the notion that you, or the male athletes you identify with as role models, might soon be put at risk of being beaten by a girl once in a while.
Someone want to alert Microsoft that they’ve a loose cannon on deck somewhere in the “social media engagement” division of their marketing department?
I hope every time a terf orders fries they come to them cold.
Trans women and girls have been competing in women’s/girl’s sports for ages and somehow it hasn’t yet destroyed the ability of cis women and girls to compete in sports and be successful at it. So, I think we’re good.
Anyway, if it hadn’t been apparent before that TERFs are fascists, it would be apparent now. If this EO from Biden makes you miss Trump, the guy with multiple rape allegations who hired MRA Betsy Devoss to destroy title IX and make it easier to get away with rape on college campuses, the guy who put rabid antichoicers on SCOTUS, etc. you’re not a fucking feminist. At all.
@Surplus
I actually have never seen this point made before. It is a very good point, and is now my position on the subject, because it does seem very logical. Weight class distribution is an excellent answer to this and already practiced in boxing, etc, anyway. Thanks, Surplus! <3
@Surplus to Requirements
This isn’t actually an official Halo account. There are actually a few of these that are all “@halo[something]official”. They’re gimmick accounts that post jokes to lure people in and then start gradually getting more racist/sexist/queerphobic/etc. I’ve had run-ins with them a couple times.
Seriously? Sounds like a trademark lawsuit waiting to happen. After all, they’re besmirching one of Microsoft’s flagship products by association with their ugly evil rhetoric.
BTW, not directed at transphobes in particular but those guys are the reason some of us want America godless. Christianity has fused so much with capitalist and patriarchal ideals in the popular imagination for America and perhaps outside that some of us want nothing to do with it.
And BTW anyone who can excuse an abusive straight couple over a wholesome gay couple needs to take a look at how their faith, or whoever leads their faith, promotes mediocrity.
“The hashtag also attracted a veritable army of trolls and reactionaries who weren’t so careful about hiding their transphobia — or their homophobic, or their racism.” Don’t forget their ableism!
As you correctly guessed, it’s not true – trans women don’t have superior muscle strength than cis women. Trans athletes do, because that includes trans men, who do. This is the usual terf disingenuousness where their refusal to say “trans women” allows them to conceal the fact that they are talking about a group that includes trans men (and sometimes all non-binary / gnc people as well) but pretend it’s just trans women.
Testosterone increases muscle mass, removing it lowers muscle mass. But it also changes the types of muscles. A woman (cis or trans) with the same muscle mass as a man (cis or trans) will have less muscle strength. At a highly-competitive level, women competing with men is never going to be a fair contest, and it is one of the few things that does have to be segregated.
But that is only necessary at highly-competitive levels. There is no good reason why beer-league softball should be sex-segregated, and guess what? It isn’t! If the people involved are not training two or three times a week and working out every day, then the fitness differences will overwhelm the sex differences.
The usual rule in elite sport, which works fine and doesn’t involve a load of invasive testing of everyone to determine muscle mass and strength, is that trans women have to have been on HRT with testosterone levels below a certain level (which is the same as the level for cis women in the anti-doping rules) for at least two years.
The big problem with this is not at the elite level. It’s at levels where routine anti-doping tests are not applied, but which are still more competitive than recreational sports. Especially high school, where you’re inevitably dealing with a lot of trans girls early in transition, including some who are on puberty blockers but not yet HRT. You don’t want to exclude them all for two years (especially in the US where that would certainly cost them sports scholarships to college). There is a genuinely difficult issue there, but transphobes (inc terfs) aren’t helping anyone find a solution that preserves fair competition but also maintains sporting participation.
Incidentally – gender confirmation surgery has absolutely nothing to do with this. Transphobes think it does, and they are wrong.
Also, “sex-based rights” is not even a cogent argument when we’re talking about the USA. Second wave feminists went about securing women’s rights by challenging every law with ridiculous arbitrary gendered language they could find. States started rewriting their laws pre-emptively because the feminist challenge of gendered language was so fierce and successful. Everyone was expecting congress to enact the Equal Rights Amendment, which legal thinkers anticipated would require strict scrutiny of sex-based language (meaning in order for it to appear in law it must be necessary to a vital government goal.) Anti-feminists blocked the ERA, which is why today sex-based language in law only requires moderate scrutiny (gender must be substantially relevant to an important government goal) whereas race-based language requires strict scrutiny. Still, second-wavers successfully changed the legal landscape with legal challenges to gendered language and they especially focused on laws protecting women, re-writing them to be gender neutral. They for instance rewrote separate rape and sodomy laws into gender-neutral sexual assault laws that no longer required the three types of corroborative evidence previously required to prove rape. (Hence the eventual ability of the supreme court to strike down sodomy laws, as they no longer had a function except bigotry.) So the TERFs can say they’re anti-trans but they can’t say they’re protecting sex-based rights, because that’s not what we have in the U.S.
Biden is making things a bit awkward for the Johnson admin in the UK. They have been trying to fire up the culture war to distract from COVID and Brexit with attacks on “wokeness” but an interviewer asked Johnson if he thought Biden was woke.
Johnson of course is already on shaky ground with the Biden admin so after some rambling he said that there was nothing wrong with being woke, which would be news to the Boris Johnson of two weeks ago.
Now his spokesperson is pretending not to know what that word means.
@Lainy
I don’t know about all transphobes, but in my experience TERFs do oppose breast implants because a) they’re convinced that all trans women’s breasts are implants (which is not true, breasts grow naturally on estrogen + progesterone, some get implants but not most) and b) because getting breast implants could make someone feel better about their appearance and be more comfortable in their own skin, and bigots don’t want that.
@SpecialFFrog
And of course that’s on top of the fact that using the word “woke” pejoratively is racist.
Anyway, back on topic, I saw this last night:
https://twitter.com/TheWolfSpirit1/status/1352494037467602944
The screenshot is in the tweet, and shows some transphobe who has convinced themself that trans women will end abortion because we don’t have uteruses (?) and that Trump is therefore better. As for the first part, every trans person I’ve ever met is pro choice, so the idea that trans women want to end abortion is nonsense. Meanwhile 40some percent of cis women think abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances.
I read a really interesting solution to this (I think from a sports scientist) which was to create algorithyms that will group people according to who is most well matched competitively. So a person with greater lung capacity might end up (due to this and other factors, such as previous performance, hormone level etc) grouped competitively with another person who has lots of fast-twitch muscle fibers. Apparently they are interested in it because it also means differently-abled people advantaged by certain prosthetics could start competing outside of the Special Olympics.
I think it sounds like a good solution (especially as trans women and intersex people wouldn’t have to go through hormone therapy just to compete in the correct gender catagory, if they don’t want to), although creating the algorithym would be a lot of work and would probably have some teething problems.
@lollypop : that idea fall in the trap that algorithms look objectives, but aren’t.
For the same reason that facial recognition sofwares and crime prediction softwares are horribly racists and ableist, theses algorithms will be horribly racist and ableist.
The bias of the human engineers will translate into the algorithms, except people won’t see it. So it’s a solution only if the designers are very carefully vetted and the end result is very carefully checked, just like if it was a group of human deciding the categories.
I’m probably being a bit thick here, but do you actually need an algorithm?
If you want to measure performance ability, isn’t that just something you can assess instantly from an athlete’s current scores? Then you don’t need to worry about all the variables, there’s an objective value to categorise them by.
That’s pretty much how a lot of team sports work. You get put in various leagues or divisions based on last season’s results. Then each year the top teams of each division move up a band and the lower ranking move down.
Couldn’t that work for individual athletes?
Something like chess ratings — simple to administer, transparent how it works …
Hi all. First time posting, kinda nervous. Here’s trans Thai boxer, Somros Polcharoen:
I think this plays into what Surplus to Requirements was saying about pairing athletes with similar muscle mass.
Youth sports in the US are an odd mosaic of school teams, club teams, and leagues run by municipalities or youth organizations. As a whole, the system has many issues, but works well-enough in enough places that it likely to remain more-or-less the same for the foreseeable future. As more and more trans kids are able to be out and compete in sports, it will cause ripples in the decentralized system, and it will take some work to adjust to this new normal. This is vital work that benefits all, and the anti-trans folks are making things worse for everyone with the false and alarmist screeching.