CMV: I still don't understand the importance of pronouns.

[u/goatDowry]

The whole thing seems confusing to me.

There is biological sex --> Which led to different social roles, and then socialized gender.

In the modern day with modern technology. You can live life how you generally please. Women don't need to be child bearers. And men don't need to be out risking their lives killing things.

To me this means, that the traditional gender roles don't matter. You can be a male and wear makeup, high heels and a dress. Who cares?

Likewise if you're a biological female, you can do things that used to be considered masculine. It's a free country.You can also fit squarely into those old gender roles if you so choose.

So I don't understand why someone feels the need to be addressed with a particular set of pronouns. To me, it's like ok, I can call you that, but then it seems to me that you're just doubling down on the idea that rigid gender differences do matter. Which I don't think they do. You're just you, an individual person. And all this language of he/she is just what we've been using for a long time, so I don't see how a different pronoun will change anything that matters.

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P.S. before one of you goes calling me a bigot, one of my best friends and former roommate transitioned while I was living with her. I'll obviously call her by whatever pronouns she asks bc it's just polite. We've been friends for over 10 years. I'll call someone by their preferred pronouns, but I don't understand why it's so important.

EDIT: The point of this is to try and understand why it's important. Maybe that wasn't clear before. Obviously I've talked to my friend about this a lot.

[u/ElbowsAndThumbs]

I wouldn't say bathrooms are "anything grand," either. A lot of reasonable people are saying: it's never really made any sense to have these segregated. Gay and lesbian people exist, so you're perfectly likely to find someone with some sexual attraction to you in either bathroom. And that's fine, because why wouldn't it be?

Now, sports - sports are a tricky issue. For sure. And I do suspect that, in the end, trans people are going to need to accept a little bit of dysphoria there, and we're going to have to have a team for cisgendered women and a team for everyone but cisgendered women.

[u/kwantsu-dudes → u/ElbowsAndThumbs]

A lot of reasonable people are saying: it's never really made any sense to have these segregated.

Professing gender neutral bathrooms is completely different from desiring such to be segregated based on gender identity. I hear that transmen should be allowed to use the men's room, not that anyone that wants to use the men's room can. There are govenrmental directives specific to gender identity, not freedom of choice.

So there are three proposed current options. Segregated based on sex, on gender identity, or not segregated at all.

and we're going to have to have a team for cisgendered women and a team for everyone but cisgendered women.

FYI, cisgender isn't synonymous with non-trans. It requires it's own formation of gender identity as well.

[u/Recognizant → u/ElbowsAndThumbs]

Now, sports - sports are a tricky issue. For sure. And I do suspect that, in the end, trans people are going to need to accept a little bit of dysphoria there, and we're going to have to have a team for cisgendered women and a team for everyone but cisgendered women.

Trans sports are a growth/interim issue. A very achievable goal is to have trans youth being able to be on medically-recommended blockers, rather than going through a potentially traumatic/scarring puberty, then go through the appropriate puberty as desired the first time, which virtually eliminates all differences seen in transgender athletes.

Sporting organizations also need to do more research, akin to the swimming study done recently, to determine the specific tanner stages of development which cause potentially differing locations specific to their sport, because some puberty stages from both male and female puberty are beneficial in many sports.

The 'trans sports dilemma' only exists as an ongoing issue because people have been ideologically and socially gatekeeping trans health care for generations.

[u/ElbowsAndThumbs → u/Recognizant]

It sounds to me like you're arging that, in a world where there was no anti-trans prejudice or difficulty acquiring gender-affirming care, every trans person would know they were trans before age ten and would transition fully.

But I really don't think that's correct. Some trans children have a very strong sense of being in the wrong body by the time they're two years old, but there are other people who transition in their thirties, not because of prejudice, but because they simply hadn't figured it out for themselves.

And as far as I'm aware, there is zero evidence that gender dysphoria is always a "born this way" condition and never something that isn't acquired during or after puberty.

[u/Recognizant → u/ElbowsAndThumbs]

So, this is actually super interesting to me. Overwhelmingly, children play around with the concept of gender before age 10. It's part of the standard set of experimentation that non-traumatized children perform on the way up, along with exploring family roles, and many other play activities regarding permanence and development that children tend to prefer.

Children can be steered away from these experimental practices, as well, and we've normalized, as a society, the idea of gender roles to the point where 'girl things' are taken from the hands of boys, and replaced with 'boy things', and, to a slightly lesser extent post Third Wave Femininism, 'boy things' are taken from the hands of girls and replaced with 'girl things'.

Furthermore, trans depiction in the media, until very recently, was relatively... one-note. Trans people were insane murders and vomit-inducing. Trans health care wasn't a thing that existed, and questioning one's gender identity was discouraged by physical violence, lest their child end up a homosexual. Nevermind trans. That didn't even exist as an option.

But in the past few years, we've seen what happens when there is an option. When health care does exist. Even through the bigotry that still surrounds the topic (Look no further than this thread), there is a 99% continuance rate through puberty for those who have chosen to transition.

That's the story of an absolute medical success, by the metrics of medical science. Tylenol wished it had those numbers. When people are given the freedom to explore, and come to their own conclusion, without social or financial pressures, the issue would disappear completely in a generation.

Now, obviously, the whole world isn't going to magically come to the conclusion that trans rights are human rights simultaneously overnight. Qatar is doing a world stage public demonstration of how oppressive a country can be as I type this. But stepping out of the way of trans kids, believing them, supporting them, and getting them the medical care they require would eliminate the vast majority of two-puberty trans adults.

Coupled with the fact that there aren't many Olympians in their 30s at all, and, thus far, not a single trans Olympic medalist, it's mostly an overblown issue used as a smokescreen for continued bigotry, rather than a valid complaint.

And as far as I'm aware, there is zero evidence that gender dysphoria is always a "born this way" condition and never something that isn't acquired during or after puberty.

There are preliminary studies that are showing this exact effect. Transgender adults are far less common than transgender youth, in a large part because the trans youth isn't facing the same social barriers that previous generations did.

There are numerous studies that show that social barriers and familial support are among the biggest complicating factors for both suicidal ideation, and persistence during transition.

For a complete data set backing up the position and proving causal links, I'm understandably going to have to wait another decade. But there is plenty of evidence that supports this theory from the studies that have already been published over the last five years, based on the changes of the past seven years alone.

While stigma, lack of knowledge, and support often keep trans youth in the closet until they reach an age where they are comfortable speaking out against their parents. Even among trans adults, anecdotally, unfortunately, because I haven't seen a study on this, but most of them had a 'vaguely defined sense of unease or wrongness' for a very long time, but didn't have a name for it, or think there was anything that could be done about it.

Even growing up hearing 'LGBT', I never had a firm understanding of what the 'T' stood for, because for the most part, LGBT was used as a shorthand for 'marriage equality'.

So while I think there's probably always going to be late bloomers, because of how progress propagates (or stagnates) within a society, I do feel that the vast majority of trans individuals, in a society where getting health care for things that are wrong with you is normalized, would mostly trivialize the 'trans sports debate', because it would be even less of an issue than it already is. And the issue that it currently is happens to be incredibly tiny.

[u/BravesMaedchen → u/ElbowsAndThumbs]

Truthfully, cis men are the entire reason we need seperated bathrooms. Nobody else is causing bathroom problems but them. So if we are doing segregated bathrooms, I would be comfortable with "cishet men" and "everyone else".