This is a supervised thread. Note these guidelines:

1. This is not a place to vent about how you think transgender people are ruining society.
2. This is not a place to share your favorite conspiracies about transgender people.
3. Debating pronouns and word usage is within bounds, but you will do it respectfully.
4. This is not a place to carry out your favorite forum quarrel.

Ignoring the above will likely lead to a quick vacation from the forum.

This Pew Research survey summary is well worth a read. It shows how complex this issue is politically better than mere words can.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-t...gender-issues/

If you are too lazy to do that yourself, here is an opinion piece from the the Dallas Morning News which attempts to summarize it for you:
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/c...-are-changing/

O looked at your first link

The question about making it illegal on medical care ....... It looks like 26%of GOP and 72% of Dem Shouldn't all those numbers be the other way around? Unless I am reading it wrong which is entirely possible and probable

Got your colors backwards. Red is GOP, Blue is Dem.



72% Red GOP says it should be illegal, only 26% Blue dem

One of the little quirks of Canada is that our parties are opposite colours from the US, the conservatives in Canada are Blue. So lozen and I always have to do this annoying translation and **** it up from time to time

I find the "medical care for gender transition" question challenging because I think people picture quite a few different things. One of the challenges in communicating around this issue is that people might support a ban for "medical care for gender transition under 18" because they are imagining this being full genital reconstruction surgeries for preteens, say, as opposed to counselling sessions for social transitions, or hormone therapy for late teens, which might give quite a different answer on a poll.

Regardless, MY personal view - shocking I know - is that these types of things should be up to individuals, their families, and their doctors, but not GOP politicians trying to legislate them away.

This was a hot discussion on Twitter and is an area of the Transgender discussion I really struggle with and do not know what the solution could be?

I think there should be no doubt, that young children are highly tuned to any sense of approval and will mimic, adapt and own certain behaviours, without understanding the influences or forms of coercion they may be subject too. Simply applauding a child when they eat, can get kids to over eat to seek praise, to the point they feel sick. Also kids look for ways to compete for parental attention and parents often do not even know they are favouring some things (or a child) over another.

None of that above is to say a child could not have genuine uncoerced feelings that they are trans but I will say I do not think a child could ever know if there feelings were uncoerced.

In this story above, this child has had escalating adulation and attention for being trans, which is an undeniable form of coercion and there are articles saying it is already decided she will have the full surgery at age 16, which is also being met with a lot of praise, in the trans community and by other supporters.

Nothing wrong with having supporters but again, the coercive impact needs to be considered.

(I would be fine with ganstaman being the sole person to reply to the above with some perspective and context as I suspect this topic will instead only draw flaming from both sides, but lets see how this forum can handle this, in this new thread.)

I largely agree with the above.

But I also do not think a child, whose parents still have the custodian role, should be able to defy the parents and get hormones or surgery without their permission or go around them thru the schools without the schools informing the parents.

Yes, that could lead to some shitty situations where ignorant or just unagreeable parents deny their child, and the child suffers some real harm (psychological or other) but that so to does that risk exist when a child defies a parent who does know better.

Regardless my view is that these types of 'mistakes' in either direction are ones 'families' make together all the time and the State should not step in and allow the child to get around that, without an enormously high bar being surmounted.

You learn something new every day. I had no idea that the colors were reversed in Canada.

Red = Left and Blue = right/conservative is how its done in most countries.

Red is the colour traditionally associated with the left etc, Red army etc.

USA is the kid doing its own thang.

The closet flipped analog is probably gay conversion therapy where democrats want to outlaw something republicans say should be up to families. Of course the huge symmetry breaking comes from how the medical community itself. I'm willing to jut go with their judgment.Not because they are always right, but because political noise isn't going to fix errors.

Nah i looked at the Column Heads and thought everything under it was that party. I see my mistake

I am fine with adults living any way they want to live, but I have an issue with anyone wanting to choose their pronouns, mostly because it seems very narcissistic and controlling of other people. A pronoun is a word that others use for you when you are not present. Stating your "preferred pronouns" is demanding how people should refer to you when you're not around. When I'm not around, maybe people refer to me by "he", maybe by "she", and maybe by "that douchebag". I wouldn't know, and honestly it shouldn't really matter to me.

Also, using "they" for a single, specific person, can be very confusing. I don't buy the excuse that many people have always used "they" for an indefinite single person as being in support of this, because that is a different situation. A few years ago, before I had become fully aware of how widespread this is getting, I read a book which included a non-binary character (but with a clearly feminine name) who was always referred to as "they", and the book was very confusing until halfway through it was explained.
Anyway, English already has a perfectly good ungendered single pronoun: "it".

Here we go..

Chilrob with it's at best rudimentary understanding of language structure and numbered person narratives isn't going to say anything reasonable on this subject.

getting close.... is all Imma gunna say

Strong statement from someone who misspelled my user name and misused "it's" in the same sentence.

Didn’t realize it was so touchy!

I’m okay with pronouns but you can’t make me use gerunds, I refuse.

Do you feel similarity that it is very narcissistic and controlling of other people to have a preferred name you go by that they ought to refer to you as when you're not around?

Most people regularly use the singular they. For example, I might say "I saw someone at the grocery store who had the most ridiculous cart. They had filled it up to the brim with broccoli!". This has nothing to do with trans issues, it is just a pretty banal every day sentence nobody has a problem with. But replace "they" with "it" and it doesn't make grammatical sense.

Personally I dislike the new meaning for old words paradigm. Those type of language rules need to happen organically and not forced on the populace because 'reasons". and if disagree with the "reasons" for any reason then you are a transphobe.

1: Yeah, I actually do think so. It's like the people who try to give themselves a nickname. You don't give yourself a nickname, other people decide what it is. Most people don't give themselves their "preferred" name anyway. It is given to them at birth, and most people decide to stick with it, whether they like it or not. I was named after my father, who is my most despised person (formerly) in existence, and it still wasn't worth the trouble for me to try to change my name.

2: I guess some people do use "they" in that manner, but personally I would say "he" or "she" had it filled up. They isn't particularly unclear in your sentence though, because you already mentioned "someone" in the previous sentence. Replacing "they" with "it" sounds odd because English speakers don't generally refer to individual people by "it", but I don't find it ungrammatical.

"I saw a dog at the pet store who had the most ridiculous cart. It had filled it up to the brim with cat food!" Not as odd, because English speakers do sometimes refer to dogs by the pronoun "it". I'm not meaning to imply any correlation between non-binary people and animals, just that if "it" started being used to refer to people, it would not sound odd, and it would be less confusing than using "they" to stand for a single person.

If non-binary people generally believe that the word "it" has a stigma that won't go away, I think it would be better to just make up a new word. It wouldn't be that tough; in my lifetime the word "Ms." came into popular use for a similar reason.

I think (maybe unfairly?) that you're smart enough to understand that calling someone "it" is deliberately dehumanizing and obnoxious. So I'm kind of struggling to find a response to this that won't run afoul of the rules of the thread.

I don't think it should be; but as I said, if it is not liked by the non-binary, I would be in support of the creation of a new singular genderless pronoun over the misuse of "they".