Here’s a novel definition of transgender people…although it’s not at all novel in the sense that it’s desperate flailing about trying to find an anatomical basis for discrimination. When all else fails, invent a criterion.
Pakistan’s progressive transgender laws are currently under attack. As legislators and clerics oppose the country’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act four years after it was passed, one senator wants to change how the measure defines transgender persons. Fawzia Arshad, a senator from Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) says transgender people should be defined as those who “keep one hole for urination.”
Arshad’s bill reflects a trend of escalating dissent and misinformation campaigns against the country’s transgender laws, in an effort to bring it in line with their understanding of Islamic teachings on gender and sex. While Arshad’s awkwardly-worded proposal has bemused many, making some wonder if she knows the difference between a vagina and a urethra, there’s also a larger concern over the direction this movement is taking.
Confusing. By this definition, I am transgender. So is my wife. So is everyone, including Fawzia Arshad, unless she has an unfortunate medical condition.
Isn’t it terrible that the most ignorant people are also the most confident about their mistaken beliefs?
So all birds and reptiles and other animals with a single opening for waste excreting (eg cloacas) are trans then?
New state slogan for Alabama: “At least we’re not Pakistan!”
StevoR @1: I think that animals with cloacas are the only ones who aren’t trans, by this definition.
“Isn’t it terrible that the most ignorant people are also the most confident about their mistaken beliefs?”
Yes. As it always has been, and always will be.
Yes, it’s confusing. One really wonders what the senator thought her words meant, or indeed if she thought at all. This goes way beyond ignorance, I would say. Desperate flailing is an apt description.
Also it takes something way beyond ignorance to become a murderer. Nevertheless I see your point: ignorant statements == stochastic terrorism.
I take care of children with urological problems frequently, and that whole “keep one hole for urination” thing is mystifying. It should be pretty obvious that unless you are on dialysis (and sometimes even if you are) you need a “hole” for urination. So I agree that makes pretty much everyone transgender. Which might be accurate; the idea of a spectrum of gender identity that we all have a unique place on is appealing. But I’m guessing that was not her idea. Was there some difficulty in translating the original text?
SF veteran Rob Goulart who died aged 89 this January had (in his Jake Conger trilogy) reptile people from Venus who were big about this whole trans thing (I think it was explained in The Panchronicon Plot ).
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För Chrissake, do not let Alex Jones read Hello, Lemuria, Hello which says there are evil Lemurians imprisoned in taverna deep underneath the surface of the Earth. Trapped, they use telepathy to cause mischief among humans and even looking for like-minded people who may aid in their escape (Hubbard stole a lot of those ideas for his Dienatics that later was modified into Scientology).
By Arshad’s rules, cangaroos and other marsupials must all be trans, as the plumbing is subtly different. Or am I confusing them with monotremes? Monotremes are weird, in a totally non-trans way.
Tpyo
Dianetics was the name of proto-scientology rubbish. (Van Vogt was one of those who got cheated by Hubbard in that iteration of the grift)
Spell check altered ‘caverns’ to ‘taverna’.
“By this definition, I am transgender. So is my wife. So is everyone, including Fawzia Arshad, unless she has an unfortunate medical condition.”
I don’t know anything about Arshad’s politics, but could this be her point? Could this be her way of saying “Let us protect everyone who has one hole for urination.”?
Always nice to welcome someone new to the cause of gender abolition!
Dunning & Kruger strike again.
@ 6 tedw
I would suggest the meaning intended was ‘keep one hole only for urination’, not for the release of other bodily fluids. A clumsy way of saying trans women must have vaginoplasty. That’s all the sense I can make of it.
It has been speculated that the first use of general AI will be for ‘real doll’ robots. How is Arshad going to deal with that? Robots emit waste heat, not urine.
(trigger warning)
Grassroots ignorance outside islam can also be seen in the obsession about female genital mutilation.
In Africa we also see a variant of scapegoating in killing “witches”.
A revolting aspect of the AIDS epidemic is that some still think that having sex with virgins will cure veneral diseaes, causing numerous child rapes, followed by infection.
Returning to the islam-majority states there is a looong list of ignorant practices.
The prophet himself (may no peace be upon him) fell victims to the belief that dates from a specific oasis would protect against poison and withchcraft.
A woman whose father and brothers had been killed by the muslim army served him sheep poisoned with some caustic substance, and the fool accepted.
He survived for another six years, but the intestinal injuries grew worse, and finally killed him (his sufferings are described in detailed hadiths current muslims rarely quote, because it depicts the prophet as foolhardy).
The practice of cousin marriages also go back to the prophet and might explain why he had few surviving children despite being extremely sexually active with his many wives.
The prophet also prescribed muslims should wipe their asses with a specific number of pebbles.
(I am not anti-muslim per se, it is just this particular religious leader is like all religious rubbish distilled in one person)