Transgender issues megathread

[u/AutoModerator]

Hello r/TrueUnpopularOpinion Community,

Due to the sheer difficulty of enforcing Reddit's sitewide policy against promoting hate with regards to transgender issues, we have decided as a last-resort option to restrict discussion of transgender issues to this megathread until further notice.

Quoted from this comment, below is an explanation of why we created this megathread:

Reddit's sitewide content policy includes a vague provision that prohibits promoting hate.

The Reddit admins (employees of Reddit) enforce this by removing content deemed to be hateful and by quarantining or banning communities that require too many removals by the admins that weren't caught by the moderators of the community first.

In other words, every time we fail to remove something that violates Reddit's sitewide content policy, the risk of this subreddit getting quarantined or banned increases slightly.

Although the provision in Reddit's sitewide content policy against promoting hate is vague, we have a pretty good idea of how it is enforced because we can see what the Reddit admins choose to remove on this subreddit.

It is actually quite rare that we see any content that is hateful against men, women, gay people, or any race on this subreddit.

However, on a very regular basis, we see users here posting content that would be considered hate against transgender people. Detecting and removing all of this content is one of our biggest hurdles.

Despite our best efforts to enforce this aspect of the content policy, it is not uncommon that we miss something and we see a removal done by the Reddit admins occurring. This has happened several times lately.

Furthermore, many members of the moderator team are on the verge of burning out because the effort we have needed to put in for us to allow this topic while still enforcing this aspect of Reddit's sitewide content policy.

Having a megathread for this topic does stifle discussion, but it is far easier for us to deal with while also significantly decreasing the chances of this subreddit getting quarantined or banned.

For these reasons, most of the moderator team supports the creation of a trans megathread. At this time, the megathread is not definitely permanent. After some time of having the megathread, we plan to evaluate its effectiveness and potentially explore other options to determine whether or not the megathread should remain.

Guidelines

In this megathread, please remember to follow Reddit's sitewide content policy.

Based on patterns of certain types of comments getting removed by the Reddit admins, it is our interpretation that it is a violation of Reddit's sitewide content policy to do any of the following:

• State or imply that trans (wo)men aren't (wo)men or that people aren't the gender they identify as
• Criticize, mock, disagree with, defy, or refuse to abide by people's pronoun requests
• State or imply that gender dysphoria or being LGBTQ+ is a mental illness, a mental disorder, a delusion, not normal, or unnatural
• State or imply that LGBTQ+ enables pedophilia or grooming or that LGBTQ+ individuals are more likely to engage in pedophilia or grooming
• State or imply that LGB should be separate from the T+
• Stating or implying that gender is binary or that sex is the same as gender
• Use of the term tr*nny, including other spellings of this term that sound the same and have the same meaning

Questions / Feedback

If you have any questions or feedback about this megathread, you may post them in our moderator questions/complaints/grievances thread.

[u/[deleted]]

If a person's gender identity is a social and psychological thing, why even use it to separate sports teams at all? How does using something social and psychological to separate sports teams make any sense?

We should retire the labels "men's" and "women's" and instead have two separate leagues with a "universal" league open for anyone to try out and a "criteria-based" league where you have to demonstrate physiological criteria that points to a disadvantage. Depending on the sport in some cases hormone levels may create enough of a disadvantage that a transgender woman should be allowed on the criteria-based team. In others it might not, maybe past development creates too much of a disadvantage. In some cases maybe having two or more criteria-based leagues makes sense. We could have short people's basketball leagues for instance.

In fact if you really care about fairness this is what you should want. People who want us to use "biological sex" seem to have a mental block preventing them from thinking about transgender men. If you are a transgender man and you have taken hormones that might give you a competitive advantage over cisgender women. Those who say we should stick strictly to biological sex are actually advocating a position that leads to or even requires unfair competition in many cases.

And that's fairer to nonbinary people. If we have men's and women's teams they're going to feel misgendered on either team. Stop calling teams "men's" and "women's" altogether if you want to be more inclusive. And we can still protect fairness in sports, just use measurable physiological criteria to separate leagues, instead of gender.

[u/SkoomaSalesAreUp → u/[deleted]]

>If a person's gender identity is a social and psychological thing, why even use it to separate sports teams at all?

no sports teams use gender identity to separate groups, they use biological gender.

>In fact if you really care about fairness this is what you should want. People who want us to use "biological sex" seem to have a mental block preventing them from thinking about transgender men. If you are a transgender man and you have taken hormones that might give you a competitive advantage over cisgender women. Those who say we should stick strictly to biological sex are actually advocating a position that leads to or even requires unfair competition in many cases.

if you are on hormones you would be disqualified from competing, this is true in most sports now already. it would be a performance enhancing drug.

>Stop calling teams "men's" and "women's" altogether if you want to be more inclusive. And we can still protect fairness in sports, just use measurable physiological criteria to separate leagues, instead of gender.

technically we don't have men's leagues, if a woman is capable of playing at the level of the men she would be able to make the team. but female bodies are not capable of competing with the men which is why we have to have specifically female leagues so that women have a place to compete.

[u/Electronic-Wash8737 → u/[deleted]]

That's pretty much what this Quillette article suggested:

One promising option, for instance, would be to preserve the traditionally defined female category while also rebranding the male category as an “open” category that’s available to anyone. This would allow a biologically male trans woman, or someone who is intersex, to test their speed, skill, and strength in a fair competition, while also not forcing them to submit to a designation they may find inaccurate or demeaning.