OP Opinion: I don’t like the article title.
TLDR: What does focusing on DNA have to do with bathrooms? An academic & too polite “use your brains dumb asses”
Samantha Rosenthal is Associate Professor of History at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, and Visiting Assistant Professor of American History at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. She is the author of two books, most recently Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City. She is co-founder of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, a nationally recognized queer public history initiative. Her work has received recognition from the National Council on Public History, the Oral History Association, the Committee on LGBT History, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Working Class Studies Association.
The whole thing is such a nothing burger, with a side of dumb fries.
Everything that’s brought up about bathroom usage is based on bullshit and/or ignorance, not sensible concerns. It’s all fantasy, no facts.
Edit: because it’s the internet, I’m talking about the objections to trans people having access to bathrooms that match their gender.
It’s such a clear example of politicised science.
Creating a system of biological categorization for living organisms? Sweet. That’s just science.
Using that system to justify hurting people? Oof.
This is, and always has been, a people problem. It has nothing to do with science.
For most of modern history, scientists, doctors and judges have agreed that humans can change sex – they just haven’t agreed on how it can be accomplished.
Not only in modern society, by the way. Take this as no more than a funny anecdote if you wish, cause I can’t provide a source, but:
My cousin lived among a native tribe in Panama for a while.
Traditionally, they only allowed men to hold political power (by speaking in the common assembly), but they only allowed women to inherit and own property.
This serves as a method to separate wealth from power, and gives women considerable status in society.
But it also poses a problem: When a couple doesn’t have daughters, they can’t hand down their wealth to the next generation.
The way around this was simple: If there were no daughters, the youngest son would become a daughter.
He (or rather, she) would lose the right to speak in the assembly, gain the right to inherit, wear the traditional women’s garb and be 100% socially female, while being 100% biologically male.I’m not saying this is a good thing, especially as their opinion doesn’t seem to matter all that much. But it shows that gender roles are not based on nature at all. They’re different in every society.
And natural sex is more than complicated enough as it is.This is an issue that’s really only made complicated by people competing to try to ensure that the concept accommodates their prejudices.
The simple reality is that the only way in which people are fixedly and simplistically one or the other is in the arrangement of their plumbing, and that’s really only relevant to things like a nurse charged with installing a catheter.
All the rest is an enormously complex combination of chemistry, environment, socialization and self-image that includes everything from the plumbing of one paired with full identification with that one to the plumbing of one with full identification with the other and includes every possible combination between the two, so insisting on absolutism is foolish at best.
