Brilliant Perspectives for the Transgender Debate

Recent times have brought transgenderism to the forefront.  Conversation has been sparked when President Obama issued his "Dear Colleagues" letter, and when that was rescinded by the Trump administration, which also recently banned transgender individuals from serving in the US military.

With all the talk, I'm pleased that Family Policy Alliance has been offering its perspective to the discussion with its Ask Me First campaign.  Part of its effort is sharing the stories of how women are being affected by the push to allow males who identify as females to have access to women's facilities.

The website has a few videos sharing these perspectives, and there are two I find particularly brilliant.  They are short videos, about 2-3 minutes long, and you can access them in links I've provided in the following paragraphs, or view the embedded videos in this post.

One video features Kara Dansky, the board chair of Women's Liberation Front (WoLF).

This self-described radical feminist group, extraordinarily, partnered with Family Policy Alliance in the campaign to push back against allowing biological men to use women's facilities.  Her organization filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration because of the "Dear Colleagues" letter.  Their argument is that the reinterpretation of Title IX's provision about gender to include "gender identity" renders those protections meaningless because identity is too fluid to have any real value in protecting the rights of women and girls that so many struggled for so greatly.

Another video features Tanner, who at the time the video was made, was a high school athlete in Alaska.

Her story tells about the time during her senior year when she competed in an Alaska State Championship for high school female runners.  One of those competing was a teen male who identifies as a female, and so was allowed to participate.  Tanner describes it as being unfair from a scientific perspective because males and females are biologically different, and that's why there are separate competitions for both genders, to ensure they are kept untainted by individuals who have a different body type.  I think her perspective offers a crucial understanding of what's at stake in the debate about transgender individuals.  It's true that a person claiming he/she is a person of the opposite gender, and can even go so far as to try to alter the body to reflect that perception, not to mention engage in practices of the other gender.  Ultimately, though, the body is going to still carry with it the gender the person was born with, especially with the arrangement of X and Y chromosomes.  A person could go through physical alterations and still be left with the same gender body, especially considering the questionable effectiveness, and even the harmfulness, of such medical procedures.  So in the case of athletic competitions, competitors would find themselves competing against people with different body types who could potentially have an advantage.

By allowing individuals who perceive themselves to be of the opposite gender to continue acting so is tampering with scientific reality, especially when a person undergoes surgery and hormone treatments to alter him/herself physically.  We definitely need to support those who are experiencing gender dysphoria, but I find it too questionable to think that a person could be born with the "wrong body".  To address this situation, we need to show these individuals a measure of compassion that helps them deal with their perceptions, without unfairly causing an imbalance in the proper distinctions that are in place between female and male.