LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

I could use a break from my current draft (which is already over the 3,000 word mark, alas), and this is certainly worthy of my time:

I propose that on Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024 (the first day that both the House and Senate are back in session), all of us who are invested in this issue and have a platform (whether it be a blog, newsletter, column, podcast, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.) publish a piece with the shared title: “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back.” Yes, I know, it’s a cheesy title, but it holds Democrats accountable to their own talking points and makes it clear that backsliding on LGBTQ+ rights is nonnegotiable for us.

Easy peas- wait, “Democrats?”

What you write or say or express in your op-ed or article or video or podcast etcetera is up to you. I encourage you to make it personal and feel free to tailor it to your audience. My only request (other than all of us using the same title) is that you implore people to contact their Congressperson and Senators (and perhaps even local politicians) and tell them that 1) you will not tolerate any backpedaling on LGBTQ+ rights whatsoever, and 2) if they fail to strongly stand up against these attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, then you will take your vote elsewhere next election.

Ah, this is somewhat US-centric. Unfortunately, I live in their hat and thus I doubt any Democratic politician would listen to me.

However, I do live in a province with a government that’s decided to demonize transgender people. Bill 29 is quite draconian: sports organizations are supposed to “establish, implement and maintain policies respecting fairness and safety,” which they must report to the government. They must also report any complaints about those policies, “requests for” or “the establishment of mixed-gender or mixed-sex leagues, classes or divisions,” and “other matters.” Anyone carrying out those orders is shielded from legal liability. What constitutes “fairness and safety?” That’s not up to the sporting organization, oh no; the government’s cabinet has full authority to prescribe “provisions or content that policies must include.” The language is very vague, with plenty of loopholes a bigot could exploit.

It has been widely condemned, a legal challenge has been launched, and even its mere proposal has made national sporting organizations rethink hosting events in our province. During its second reading, where it was supposed to be debated, both MLAs who rose to speak about the bill condemned it:

Hon. Hayter (NDP, Calgary-Edgemont): This bill is only going to discourage youth from participating. Bill 29 states that you want to have sports participation, but it really is just going to add more red tape for people to participate. Based on this government’s announcement, this bill is the first step forward barring trans women and girls from participating in women’s sports at all levels, starting at school level to being a professional athlete. …

Last year a nine-year-old girl – nine years old – participating in track and field in B.C. was harassed by people because she had short hair, so they made the assumption that she must be trans. A little girl. This government is giving a free pass to harassers in the name of protecting women in sport. This makes all women unsafe, especially Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women as well as women who are now going to be considered insufficiently feminine.

Hon. Elmeligi (NDP, Banff-Kananaskis): I want to zoom in on this idea about this unfair advantage, that somehow trans women have an unfair advantage over other athletes in sport. This idea is not supported by any science at all. … Really, this idea is based on the assumption that trans women have more testosterone, so let’s explore that a little bit. More testosterone leads to bigger muscles, faster times, tends to be associated with being stronger and faster, but that is so wrong, Mr. Chair. Again, we find a government basing policies on stereotypes, assumptions, transphobia, and just utter nonsense.

Here’s the reality check. In Judith Butler’s book Who’s Afraid of Gender? she really dives into this, and I highly recommend that all members in the House check out this book. Basically, the research shows that testosterone varies widely between and within genders. The research shows that there is considerable overlap in testosterone levels between genders: 16 and a half per cent of men have very low testosterone, 13 and a half per cent of women have higher than average testosterone, and there’s a lot overlap in those levels between genders.

It passed its second reading 43-31, with no amendments. More importantly, though, no one dared voice support of it. Even the bigots know that it’s indefensible! The silence is telling: the UCP know this isn’t going to earn them votes, if anything they’ll lose support should it become more widely known. If you’re an Albertan, now would be an excellent time to hammer that point home. Page 32 of the written record for that session lists every MLA who voted for or against Bill 29. The Alberta Government helpfully lists every current MLA. Get in touch with your MLA, and either thank them for voting against Bill 29 or politely ask them why they won’t defend their vote.

I’ve already done that process myself, and I can say it was well worth my time. My MLA has vocally supported transgender people, and they voted against Bill 29 on second reading. Now it’s your turn! I can guarantee it’ll be more satisfying than doom-scrolling US politics.

[HJH 2024-12-03] Whoops, I made the amateur mistake of assuming the second reading of this bill took place over one session. It actually was spread over three that occurred November 6th, 21st, and 26th. During the first session Hon. Schow (UCP, Cardston-Siksika) brought up the inherent strength advantages that men have over women (irrelevant, oversimplified) and that fairness demands transgender people be excluded (false). Hon. Armstrong-Homeniuk (UCP, Fort Saskatchewan-Vegreville) brought up the fairness of sport and the transformative power of sport (also covered by fairness). Hon. Petrovic (UCP, Livingstone-Macleod) again banged the fairness drum (it’s their best argument, which is damning). During the second session Hon. Johnson (UCP, Lacombe-Ponoka) recycled the “fairness” and “inherent strength” talking points from earlier.

One new argument comes from Hon. Petrovic’s name-drop of Reem Alsalem, who claims that nearly 890 medals were “unfairly” won by transgender athletes. Turns out it’s absolute batshit nonsense that hinges heavily on appeals to authority. Hon. Schmidt (NDP, Edmonton-Gold Bar) inadvertently spotted the game being played here:

With respect to science we heard the Member for Lacombe-Ponoka as well as the minister for sport refer to this report by the special rapporteur to the United Nations on women and gender-based violence. There is a quote in there, that the Member for Lacombe-Ponoka said, about the hundreds of medals that have been stripped from women competing in dozens of sports, and if you look at the footnote for that in the report, that claim is made by an organization called the Womens Liberation Front, which according to their website also unapologetically supports abortion on demand. So I look forward to the members opposite also endorsing the other work that the Womens Liberation Front is proposing.

Oh, so Alsalem sourced that figure from Women’s Liberation Front, that “gender critical” organization with strong ties to the US Christian nationalist movement. And as I touch on in that blog post, TERFs have been lobbying the UN for years to add the aura of authority to their arguments. If the evidence isn’t on your side, misinformation and authoritarianism are your only hope to getting your policies implemented.

Which, I suppose, explains why the cause is so attractive to our United Conservative Party.

Richard Dawkin’s Discontinuous Mind

I mostly agree with Dawkins on this:

Everywhere you look, smooth continua are gratuitously carved into discrete categories. Social scientists count how many people lie below “the poverty line”, as though there really were a boundary, instead of a continuum measured in real income. “Pro-life” and pro-choice advocates fret about the moment in embryology when personhood begins, instead of recognising the reality, which is a smooth ascent from zygotehood. An American might be called “black”, even if seven eighths of his ancestors were white. …

If the editor had challenged me to come up with examples where the discontinuous mind really does get it right, I’d have struggled. Tall vs short, fat vs thin, strong vs weak, fast vs slow, old vs young, drunk vs sober, safe vs unsafe, even guilty vs not guilty: these are the ends of continuous if not always bell-shaped distributions.

Imposing discrete boundaries on something which lacks them is quite dangerous, indeed. It’s also necessary to survive: imagine if I had to stop and consider whether or not a portion of a wall could be opened via the application of force, and where that force should be applied, instead of going “looks like a door with a twist handle, lemmie twist it to escape the fire behind me.” Some level of imposed boundaries are a must, otherwise words cannot exist, but it’s also important to remember these are abstractions imposed for convenience instead of fundamental features of the universe.

As a biologist, the only strongly discontinuous binary I can think of has weirdly become violently controversial. It is sex: male vs female. You can be cancelled, vilified, even physically threatened if you dare to suggest that an adult human must be either man or woman. But it is true; for once, the discontinuous mind is right.

…. Oooo-kay. Dawkins is claiming that biology has a discrete boundary, between the vast majority of the subject that lacks discrete boundaries, and one small portion (sex determination) which has discrete boundaries on a fundamental level. This smells heavily of special pleading. What makes sex determination distinct from the rest of biology? [Read more…]

Is the Gender Critical Movement Still a Cult?

When sitting down to type up this post, I thought I’d do a little follow-up on an old story. I was surprised when I ran across this:

“PinkNews and Julie Bindel are pleased to confirm that they have settled the case over the article PinkNews published on 17 May 2020, which chronicled a young American’s account of their recruitment to and time involved with a ‘gender critical cult’. The article made a number of serious allegations of misconduct and PinkNews accepts that if the allegations were understood to refer to Julie, they would be wholly untrue.

“Julie Bindel accepts that PinkNews published the article without intending to make any such reference to her. PinkNews is sorry for the distress the article caused. It has taken down the article and will not be republishing it. PinkNews has revised its editorial processes.”

What?! Beau Dyess had quite a few screenshots in their corner, so how could the story turn on a dime like that? [Read more…]

Harriet Hall Is No Skeptic

Whoops! When I wasn’t looking, Harriet Hall had a peek at what her critics have been saying and created a revised version of her review of Shrier’s book. The last thing I’d like to do is spread misinformation about Hall’s views, so I spent some time going line by line through both her original review and the revised one, to see what changed.

[CONTENT WARNING: Transphobia, skeptics being capital-S Skeptics]

[Read more…]

A Transgender Athlete Reader

Remember this old thing?

Rationality Rules was so confident nobody would take him to task, his “improved” video contains the same arguments as his “flawed” one. And honestly, he was right; I’ve seen this scenario play out often enough within this community to know that we try to bury our skeletons, that we treat our minorities like shit, that we “skeptics” are just as prone to being blind followers as the religious/woo crowds we critique. And just like all those other times, I cope by writing words until I get sick of the topic. Sometimes, that takes a while.

In hindsight, “a while” turned out to be seven months and about seventeen blog posts. Why on Earth would I spend so much time and effort focused on one vlogger? I don’t think I ever explained why in those posts, so let’s fix that: the atheist/skeptic movement has a problem with transphobia. From watching my peers insinuate Ann Coulter was a man, to my participation in l’affair Benson, I gradually went from “something feels off about this” to “wow, some of my peers are transphobes.”

As I picked apart the arguments made by transphobes, I started to see patterns. Much like with religious and alt-Right extremists, there’s a lot of recycling going on. Constantly, apologists are forced to search for new coats of paint to cover up old bigoted arguments. I spotted a shift from bathroom rhetoric to sports rhetoric in early 2019 and figured that approach would have a decent lifespan. So when Rationality Rules stuck to his transphobic guns, I took it as my opportunity to defuse sports-related transphobic arguments in general. If I did a good enough job, most of these posts would still be applicable when the next big-name atheist or skeptic tried to invoke sports.

My last post was a test of that. It was a draft I’d been nursing for months back in 2019, but after a fair bit of research and some drastic revisions I’d gotten Rationality Rules out of my system via other posts. So I set it aside as a test. If I truly was right about this shift to sports among transphobes, it was only a matter of time until someone else in the skeptic/atheist community would make a similar argument and some minor edits would make it relevant again. The upshot is that a handful of my readers were puzzled by this post about Rationality Rules, while the vast majority of you instead saw this post about Shermer and Shrier.

The two arguments aren’t quite the same. Rationality Rules emphasizes that “male puberty” is his dividing line; transgender women who start hormone therapy early enough can compete as women, according to him, and he relies on that to argue he’s not transphobic at all. Shermer is nowhere near as sophisticated, arguing for a new transgender-specific sporting category instead. Shrier takes the same stance as Rationality Rules, but she doesn’t push back on Shermer’s opinions.

But not only are the differences small, I doubt many people had “women are inherently inferior to men in domain X” on their transphobe bingo card. And yet, the same assertion was made at two very different times by three very different people. I consider this test a roaring success.

One consequence is that most of my prior posts on Rationality Rules’ arguments against transgender athletes still hold quite a bit of value, and are worth boosting. First, though, I should share the three relevant posts that got me interested in sports-related apologia:

Trans Athletes, the Existence of Gender Identity, … / … and Ophelia Benson: The first post proposed two high-level arguments in favour of allowing transgender athletes to compete as the gender they identify with. The second is mostly about calling out Benson for blatant misgendering, but I also debunk some irrational arguments made against transgender athletes.

I Think I Get It: My research for the prior two posts led me to flag sport inclusion as the next big thing in transphobic rhetoric. The paragraph claiming “they think of them as the worst of men” was written with Benson in mind, but was eerily predictive of Shermer.

And finally, the relevant Rationality Rules posts:

EssenceOfThought on Trans Athletes: This is mostly focused on EssenceOfThought‘s critique of Rationality Rules, but I slip in some extras relating to hemoglobin and testosterone.

Rationality Rules is an Oblivious Transphobe: My first crack at covering the primary factors of athletic performance (spoiler alert: nobody knows what they are) and the variation present. I also debunk some myths about transgender health care, refute some attempts to shift the burden of proof or argue evidence need not be provided.

Texas Sharpshooter: My second crack at athletic performance and its variance, this time with better analysis.

Rationality Rules is “A Transphobic Hack“: This is mostly commentary specific to Rationality Rules, but I do link to another EssenceOfThought video.

Special Pleading: My second crack at the human rights argument, correcting a mistake I made in another post.

Rationality Rules is a “Lying” Transphobe: I signal boost Rhetoric&Discourse‘s video on transgender athletes.

“Rationality Rules STILL Doesn’t Understand Sports”: A signal boost of Xevaris‘ video on transgender athletes.

Lies of Omission: Why the principle of “fair play” demands that transgender athletes be allowed to compete as their affirmed gender.

Begging the Question: How the term “male puberty” is transphobic.

Rationality Rules Is Delusional: Rob Clark directs me to a study that deflates the muscle fibre argument.

Cherry Picking: If transgender women possess an obvious performance benefit, you’d expect professional and amateur sporting bodies to reach a consensus on that benefit existing and to write their policies accordingly. Instead, they’re all over the place.

Separate and Unequal: I signal boost ‘s comic on transgender athletes.

Rationality Rules DESTROYS Women’s Sport!!1!: I take a deep dive into a dataset on hormone levels in professional athletes, to see what would happen if we segregated sports by testosterone level. The title gives away the conclusion, alas.

That takes care of most of Shermer and Shrier’s arguments relating to transgender athletes, and the remainder should be pretty easy. I find it rather sad that neither are as skilled at transphobic arguments as Rationality Rules was. Is the atheist/skeptic community getting worse on this subject?

The Weaker Sex

There’s an odd asymmetry in how Shermer and Shrier think about transgender athletes. They talk exclusively about transgender women entering women’s sport, but ignore the possibility of transgender men entering men’s sport. A sample:

[1:00:47] SHRIER: Sometimes people look at the numbers and they say there aren’t that many transgender kids, so there’s no reason for the moral panic. Who cares if the number one, two, and three spots go to biological boys? First of all, there’s obviously the incredible unfairness of fixing the race … telling girls “oh, you’ll never ever, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you train, you will never be number one. You will never make regionals.”… That’s a very different prospect for young women … [1:01:19]

So being assigned female doesn’t offer any advantages in any sport? At all? Let’s make a case for a female advantage. I’ll point out the logical and rhetorical flaws I’m deploying via tool-tips. [Read more…]