What about intersex people?
There will always be intersex people and that's a case of not letting the exception swallow the rule.
The more I read people's opinions on transgenderism, and this is not directed at any one person, the more I get a grasp on how obtusely some smart people can look at things. I remember Joe just was saying something about the left and common sense and Zow of all people said this was a way to cut someone short. To not give the opportunity to logically maintain and argue their position. That common sense was just a conceit of the party that had had it their way all along, a way of cementing unearned power.
But Zow is wrong.
What was meant by "common sense" is that we have a million different avenues and ways to do things, already explored in history. We should act, in most if not all cases, on our inherited wisdom. It's a Burkean concept of how history moves. The dominant culture carries good ideas, the "inherited wisdom" theory goes, because what allowed it to be dominant was its proficiency at certain things. Things that logic dictates as a result of certain premises that wind up not being good for society are relegated to its dustbin precisely because these things, in the end, are either so immoral as to be repugnant or are not utile. We call that which we leave behind and enforce wisdom, not logic. Logic, as the famous dictum goes, is not the heart of the law.
And thus goes the basic biological distinctions between the sexes, apparent not only to eye, but to all senses, really. To reject the senses in this particular case to apply a weird utopian logic about the exceptions (both the dysphoric and intersexed) is silly and disastrous. It undercuts basic advances made in the name of gender roles (e.g., women participating in sports, generally a male province) and relegates them to the dustbin in hopes of a greater utopia.
And yet again, the utopia sought is almost a nightmare of resultant effects, undoing the artifice that separating the sexes in sports was in the first place.
But what do I mean this "artifice"? I guess here the contrarian really gets a hold of me. What is this to some? Is the end of women's sports so bad if this is carried out to its logical extremes? I guess, in a roundabout way, some are all for the end to modern women's sport, anyway. Women's sports, to some, are dumb conceits resulting from other dumb utopian longings, those borne of feminist utopian longings that were always pie-in-the-sky. Some might wish that the men merrily join them in their pursuits and they can ruin hand-in-hand together that which was ridiculous in the first place. Women's sports? If some men never hear Martina Navratoliva's name again (and she was at the firestorm of this controversy back three years ago when she foresaw this exact thing and dissented publicly, getting called a transphobe) they'll not lose a wink of sleep over it. So God bless this cluster to all, and to all a good night.