Help me with the argument that trans rights aren't the same as gay rights hence we are NOT on "the wrong side of history"

[flashbac]

I'm sure you've all heard the the line, constantly pushed, "you're on the wrong side of history, the gay rights movement went through the same resistance" and so on.

I have an argument about who each sets of rights affects hence the difference but there has to be a better line than "this thing doesn't affect me personally so it's fine whereas that thing redefines my identity and seeks to erase the biological reality on which my oppression is based hence its not fine"
Or am I just lacking in conviction/confidence here?

I think the problem is that transpeople are asking for far more than any other group of people. The rights gay people fought for were simply to be able to have a relationship with other consenting adults of the same sex. That has zero impact on anyone else's life. Transpeople have that right, and the right to express themselves however they want to. The issue is when they want to take rights away from other people. It is not the same thing at all.

Transsexual people (those that have medically transitioned) already have equality and protections.

"Trans" rights has morphed into "transgender" and "gender identity". Self-ID doesn't help transsexual people, and we now have people denying science and biological fact because of "equality".

The battle for gender identity is actually eroding support for transsexual people.

@NecessaryScene

Sounds to me like you mainly lack confidence.

Jane Clare Jones doesn't, and here's her take on the theme.

[[https://janeclarejones.com/2018/09/09/gay-rights-and-trans-rights-a-compare-and-contrast/
Gay Rights and Trans Rights – A Compare and Contrast]]

Thank you for this. Just the ticket!

Particularly like this bit: "The key thing to understand about trans rights activism is that, unlike gay rights activism, it is not just a movement seeking to ensure that trans people are not discriminated against. It is, rather, a movement committed to a fundamental reconceptualization of the very idea of what makes someone a man or a woman. "

All the arguments aside are we moving in the "right" direction by supporting individuals in a belief in which one can be born in the "wrong body"? To me it seems illogical and somewhat medieval. On a physical, emotional, economic, and practical basis. Surely the "right" direction is supporting a person to accept and love their birth body, unless it is seriously malfunctioning. A progressive society would look towards doing this.

Gay rights don't require everyone to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and ears.

Trans people have the same rights as everyone else. Gay people did not.

For me it's not even a question of a side of history. It's a simple question of truth vs fiction. It is impossible to change sex. The words 'woman', 'female', 'man' and 'male' have actual factual meanings. Gender is a bunch of stereotypes. Basing society and its laws on a bunch of stereotypes isn't just stupid and irresponsible, it is also regressive rather than progressive.

@BootsAndRoots

Transsexual people (those that have medically transitioned) already have equality and protections.

"Trans" rights has morphed into "transgender" and "gender identity". Self-ID doesn't help transsexual people, and we now have people denying science and biological fact because of "equality".

The battle for gender identity is actually eroding support for transsexual people.

Yes, I think it's easier to understand this kind of argument about it being "the same" if we see that it comes out of a perspective that focuses on equity and identity. It's the same perspective that spends a lot of time talking about which group oppresses which other group in terms of justifying practices and interventions.

But so much of the discourse in social justice focuses on these ideas, and not just in terms of gender issues.

Gay rights took nothing away from us. The push was for their rights. Modern debate demands rights of women (and women shoved out).

Many gay people will say this too.

Here is an argument about an important difference between being gay and being trans.

-- It turns on the fact that, for some X, but not all, to feel that one is X is just to be X, and consequently, while some self-descriptions are self-validating, others are self-delusive.

Suppose I feel that I am angry. It will follow that I am angry. Feeling angry is being angry.

However, suppose I feel that I am fat. It will not follow that I am fat. Feeling fat is not being fat.

( Note , in passing, that feeling angry does not explain or define what it is to be angry. We know what it is to be angry independently of the equivalence of feeling angry with being angry. The equivalence, to make any sense, requires this independence.)

OK, now, in respect of this 'feeling/being' equivalence, being gay is like being angry; being trans is like being fat.

Why? -- Look (suppose, for definiteness, I am a man):

To say I am gay is to say I feel that I am attracted to men. And feeling that I am so attracted is being so attracted. So if I sincerely say I am gay, I must be gay.

However, to say I am trans is to say I feel that I am a woman. And feeling that I am a woman is not being a woman. No matter how sincere my avowal, my feeling so will not guarantee my being so.

(Here we might need the note from above: we need independent knowledge of what it is to be a woman, in any case.)

So being gay is wholly different from being trans. A sincere self-description of one's sexual orientation is necessarily veridical, whereas a sincere self-description of one's sex having changed is mistaken.

[This argument may be partially evaded by denying that a trans person changes sex. But that is OK, I suppose.]

I remember reading a column not too long ago by Julie Bindel in which she explained her reasons for arguing that there are differences between the two. It might have been in UnHerd.

People who are gay do not need the whole world to validate them.

They also don't need to enforce compelled speech.

They also don't gaslight people.

Trans Rights is a misnomer - it trans demands.

The demands are that women, the cunty kind, give up their rights to men with identities or indeed in the case of self ID to any man that wishes to take them.

Including men in the sex class women immediately means you are excluding some women, often the most marginalised and vulnerable - what happens to them and their rights?

It is fundamentally a power grab masquerading as a civil rights movement and it was framed as a civil rights movement deliberately.

As pps have said, gay rights took nothing from anyone and put LGB folk on an equal footing with everyone else. This is completely different and can only be viewed as similar if you buy genderist ideology which positions women, the cunty kind, as the privileged oppressors of men with identities - that's weapon's grade arsewash right there.

It's simple. Gay people only wanted the same rights that heterosexual people had; the same age of consent, to be able to sleep with the consenting adult of their choosing without it being a crime, to not be abused at work or elsewhere for their sexual preference, and to be able to marry and have a family.

Trans rights activists want trans people to have different rights to those other people have. They want access to spaces that are not usually available to someone of their sex. They want to control others' speech.

These are not the same at all.

As a person who went through the last moral panic and the current one, please don't do what people did the last time and pretend that you supported the target of the moral panic all along. It's just insulting.

The gay rights movement didn't ask for extra rights, they just wanted the same as everyone else. The right to marry, adopt, join the armed forces etc. These were rights afforded to (and as Lammy would say hoarded by) the heteronormative majority. This was a classic civil rights battle, seeking EQUAL rights for an oppressed minority.

Tran rights wants things the rest of us don't t have. The right to change your birth certificate, the right to use spaces designated for the opposite sex, the right to compel everyone to pretend they are the opposite sex.

This is NOT a civil rights battle. This pursuit of additional rights is what causes the conflicts, and why it is not the same as gay rights.

Oops i see polly got there before me.

The key rights being demanded are new ones, spelt out explicitly here, from this 1996 document:

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1504782992635539503
twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1504784971050979328

This from a founder of Stonewall sets out some key differences

www.holyrood.com/inside-politics/view,cofounder-of-stonewall-calls-for-calm_14648.htm

I agree with you Mumsnet, what the whistleblower said of GIDS IS shocking to the gay community.

Shame we aren't allowed to voice our concerns.

I am amazed that gay rights campaigners decided to lump themselves in with an ideology that goes against so much of what they used to stand for. In the past, homophobes would call them 'nature's mistake', gays would counter no, we're born this way, this is innate, natural. This new LGBTQ+ 'genderqueer' ideology instead agrees with the homophobic position of yore: yes, if you have these thoughts, these behaviours, you ARE nature's mistake, and you need 'fixing' surgically and chemically. There is, in gender ideology, no longer a wide bandwidth of maleness or femaleness: instead a strict conformity to stereotypes: step over the line and you're the other. Boy George? No, Girl George. Even the historical dead are de-homosexualised and instead recast as 'trans', and the opposite sex all along. Homosexuality is invalidated, biology ignored, fact ignored, sex is a mere nebulous identity in your thoughts. And if you untether thought from biological reality and instead speak in terms of 'I identify as this or that' then you're getting into a territory that validates the approach of those who believe homosexuality is a temporary spirit that can be cast out.

As others have stated, the trans rights demands require EVERYONE to change the definition of what 'woman' and 'man' mean, in all parts of life. There has been no open debate about these issues and nobody is even willing to explain what the new definitions actually mean.

A corollary from this is that the new rights demands demand rights to be taken away from women and girls, as those groups are traditionally defined. The gay rights didn't have those effects.

There are many examples of women and children being harmed by this ideology.

E.g. Wi spa incident
Karen white raping in prison
Jessica yaniv trying to force religious women of colour to wax their balls
The woman gaslit that she couldn't have been raped because there was no man present.

I could go on and on

I don't think there's a similar list of people harmed by the rights gay people were asking for.

"I am amazed that gay rights campaigners decided to lump themselves in with an ideology that goes against so much of what they used to stand for"

Stonewall was basically redundant - the gay rights fight was won - until they matched onto trans rights. A solution in search of a problem

Some trans people have experienced homophobia, pre and post transition.

The demonisation of innocent members of both groups is why transphobia is similar to homophobia.
Gender-critical accounts absolutely do this as a mainstay of their organising.

It has nothing to do with splitting hairs about why in some peoples opinion trans rights are different to gay rights.

The groups who target both in this way, attacking the entire class of people based on outliers, whilst ignoring the same outlier behaviours in heterosexual and cisgender people, are identical.