The Washington Post is out with a new poll on transgender issues that finds that most Americans are about where I am. We’re cool with you living as a woman, but that doesn’t mean you are a woman.
A Washington Post-KFF poll found that 68 percent of adults oppose access to puberty-blocking medication for transgender children ages 10-14 and 58 percent oppose access to hormonal treatments for transgender kids ages 15 to 17.
The Hill: Majority of Americans oppose gender-affirming care for minors, trans women participating in sports: poll
I don’t agree with the majority on these points. How you raise your kids is your own business. Until these parents start clamoring for an end to middle and high school tackle football, they can’t convince me they really care about impressionable kids and culture-driven adults making decisions about permanent, irreversible damage to young bodies and minds. Until my birth state of Idaho and many of these other red anti-trans-care states do something about allowing children to get married, they can’t convince me they believe children aren’t old enough to make life-altering decisions.
But those are pretty solid majorities. And the reaction from the trans side is to keep hammering away at what major medical organizations say, as if that’s going to win this issue.
I’m telling you, the way to beat WATC (“What About the Children?!”) isn’t with FSLR (facts, science, logic, & reason), it’s with MYOB (mind your own business). Counter any trans-care-hurts-kids argument with a parental rights argument. “What if liberals decided that raising your kids to play tackle football was irreversibly harming your child’s mind and body, or raising them around guns, or religion?”
More than 60 percent said transgender women and girls should not be allowed to compete with other women and girls in youth, high school, college and professional sports.
No image so viscerally destroys any sympathy the majority may have for transgender people than that of an obviously male body far exceeding its female competitors. You can make all the arguments you want about testosterone levels, Michael Phelps being special, and inclusion, and they’re all erased when people see middle-aged or middle-ability male athletes beating records, smashing faces, and breaking skulls of females.
Trans and allies try to pivot by placing the trans arguments in the same frame as the gay marriage arguments of the 2000s. It’s tempting, as back then there were also majorities who opposed gay marriage and Republicans using that as a wedge issue in state after state with anti-gay marriage initiatives. Then straight people came around to acceptance a decade later.
The problem with that is there wasn’t anything at stake for straight people in opposing gay marriage. It was an inertia thing—it had never been legal and people are loathe to change. But when presented with the fact that gay folks being married has absolutely no effect whatsoever on straight people being married, MYOB took over. For many, there was never an acceptance of gay marriage, there was more a resignation to live and let live.
But with the trans issues, there is a trade-off. The trans woman athlete making the team, earning a scholarship, or winning a title or a medal means a woman didn’t. There is a zero-sum game at work here.
A majority of adults surveyed in the poll, 57 percent, said a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth, while 43 percent said it can be different from their sex assigned at birth.
I’ll never be able to accept the nonsense phrase “sex assigned at birth” and neither will most Americans. The mere framing of the question with that phrase is implicit acceptance of the intentional conflation of sex and gender being used by the trans lobby to obfuscate the issue to their advantage, namely that both sex and gender are fluid, changing states of being.
No OB/GYN has ever delivered an infant with a penis and testicles and “assigned” it to be female. Neither has one seen a vagina and declared “you’ve given birth to a boy.” Your sex is observed at birth. It is an innate state of being imprinted on every cell of your body.
Can your gender differ from your sex? Absolutely! This phenomenon has been observed since antiquity and popularized ever since The Kinks were singing “girls will be boys and boys will be girls” and Lou Reed sang “plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs and then he was a she.”
If we went back to the clearer understanding we seemed to have—that sex was the unchangeable physical aspect and gender is the changeable mental aspect—and people were asked “Do you believe a person can have a gender different from their sex?”, I wonder if we wouldn’t see strong majorities agreeing with that? With the conflation of sex and gender we find today, I think many people being polled are answering as if the question is “Do you believe a person can change their sex?”
Still, a majority of respondents said they support laws banning discrimination against transgender individuals in a range of different forums. About two-thirds or more said they support bans on transgender discrimination in the military, in K-12 schools, by medical professionals, in getting health insurance, at colleges and universities, at jobs and in the workplace and in housing.
This goes a long way toward validating my belief that most Americans are cool if you want to live as a woman, but firmly believe that doesn’t make you a woman. Where female bodies aren’t subject to athletic domination or sexual predation by males, Americans don’t care how you dress or what you’re called.
Can the trans lobby ever take those wins and accept the fact that the nature of their birth means some things just aren’t accessible to them? That life is unfair and sometimes the circumstances of your physical body closes some doors for you? No matter how much he feels in his bones he was meant to be a pilot, nobody’s going to let Stevie Wonder fly a plane. No matter how fervently he wishes to fight fires, no fire department is hiring Peter Dinklage. If we gave in and let them just to soothe their hurt feelings, somebody is going to get hurt.