Editors note: Marrec understands that trans athletes who may be banned from competing ARE victims of authoritarian right wing politics, he just thinks that an intersectional effort to push back against these fascists should have room for the Jewish diaspora and should even make room for moderate republican lawmakers who just want traditionally conservative policies implemented to exert more soft discrimination against non-trad populations. Really his main issue with ERAian Trans Activists is one of process rather than ideology.
Given the premise that sex is biology while gender is a social construct, can you please explain why distinctions made to protect a biological sex (bathrooms, sports, etc.) should be completely disallowed from discriminating based on biological sex, and instead must discriminate on the supposedly fictional construct that is gender?
In other words, why do we have separate bathrooms?
To be perfectly honest, I think the phrase "gender is a social construct" is philosophically a bit limiting because it implies that social constructs are somehow more ephemeral than physical constructs. What makes the chemical reactions that create our largely dimorphic species more "real" than the social reactions that lead to that dimorphism being expressed in expectation of the two sexes? Both are constructs that emerge from largely unrelated interaction and changing one is just as monumental a task as changing the other.
That said, being that both are emergent constructs and there is no platonic form to be found of "man" and "woman", our preception of biological sex and gender ARE fluid. Sport doesn't need to be constructed around sexual division, it could be constructed around physical size or age or practical ability or some other category that I'm not clever enough to imagine. The rules governing sport are not immutable. It should be more fluid than just saying "men can only compete against men and women can only compete against women".
The same can be said of bathrooms, why DO we have separate bathrooms when one large space punctuated by individual stalls would be more practical (if not economical)? I can understand the want for a private bathroom space, they are available in most public places, but the idea that we need to keep the genders separated when shitting or pissing for fear of predators is, frankly, childish. If we cannot self-police semi-private public spaces like public restrooms then we have deeper sociological problems to face.
