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How You Will Be Made to Care
The other day at the playground I had one of the more uncomfortable conversations in recent memory. I was talking with a conservative-leaning mom friend and her liberal 83-year old grandmother (“Bubby”) about the “transgender movement.” Bubby had a simple question for me, and one I get a lot when I express dismay about the movement: “Why do you care what someone else calls you?” My answer, to quote Erick Erickson, “We will be made to care.”
It’s not enough to live and let live; those in the social justice Left want to force you to accept and embrace whatever is on their agenda, which has shifted from gay marriage (which I was a long-time supporter of) to the idea that we can decide to be whatever gender we feel, with no connection to our DNA, biology, anatomy, etc.
Bubby asked me how it differed from gay marriage, in that we just should accept people for whatever they are. But being gay or lesbian isn’t about who or what you are; it’s about who you are sexually attracted to; it’s entirely based on feelings. But gender isn’t a social construct, no matter how much we’re told it is. Our genetics, our bone structure, our brains, our biology determine if we are a man or if we are a woman.
Bubby then asked what exactly it means to be “made to care” and what that looks like. And hence, the uncomfortable conversation. Her granddaughter mentioned “Jessica Yaniv” a transgender activist in Canada targeting immigrant beauticians and charging discrimination when they won’t offer their services. Yaniv asked for genital waxing, and even though Yaniv claims to be a woman, biology says otherwise. Yaniv has a case for discrimination, and it could mean that women in the beauty industry who are only comfortable doing a bikini wax on a woman could be forced to handle the genitalia of biological men alone in treatment rooms. What could go wrong?
Published in General
If you want to “let live”, you don’t sue bakers.
It’s actually far worse than being made to care. The activists in this group have their hooks into juvenile psychology circles and school systems, and actively encourage minors, who are very often just distressed teens who don’t fit into the everyday hell that is high school, to transition, often either behind their parents’ backs, or (if they cannot hide it from the parents) by threatening parental custody of not just the troubled kid, but of all kids in the house. What’s notable is that these kids are often found in clusters where several suddenly claim to be “trans”, which is clearly a case of social contagion and in saner times would be treated as such. There tend to be other commonalities – autism plays no small part, as does grooming by internet contacts.
This hits close to home for me as the daughter of a friend of ours was in such a cluster. The school system hid everything from her parents for a year, by which time things were far gone. For an entire year they aided and abetted this “transition”.
I’ve heard of worse things happening besides.
The abuses of the lunatics like Yaniv are terrible, but the predation of our children is far far worse.
I was never an opponent of gay marriage, I took a more libertarian position- that the government, especially the fed, has no business being involved in my marriage, that is between my spouse, myself, our lord and our families.
That said, I also knew that gay marriage was just the means to an end. Sure, they talked about some legal differences between a married and just living together scenario, but in fact, nobody and nothing was preventing them from taking vows to be together forever or anything else. They just didn’t get the stamp of federal approval. And that was always all it was about.
Once gays marriage was recognized and legitimized, it was on to the bathroom of your choice and the preferred pronouns and 5 year old gender reassignment. Exactly as many had argued, that once you smash open the door to redefining a millennium’s old tradition to be something it never was, you open the doorway to nearly anything goes. And here we are.
10 years ago the majority of people would laugh at you if you suggested that men would be suing to have their genitals waxed by women based upon the idea that these men, with male parts, are really women so they should just wax on!
Now, it is mainstream. And we haven’t gotten close to the end of anything goes.
I think having conversations like this with the Bubbys of the world is wonderful. I’m sure you could handle the points with tact, and it sounds as if the granddaughter helped a lot with her own example. Bubby has probably not thought it through much.
I think there are ways around this. Couldn’t the shop in Canada hire a male beautician to do the job? I don’t think the customer’s request for services is Unreasonable. However, it’s not reasonable for a customer to demand that he be waxed by a female.
They are expected to hire a new employee for just one customer? I suspect that since this person considers themselves female, they would object to a man waxing them. You can’t treat them any different than any other woman, right?
I don’t want to find ways to accommodate this insanity. I want to . . .
How about hiring him on a temp basis? If they object, they’re unreasonable.
Why does my brain immediately want to add the “wax off” part? And how appropriately inappropriate is that?
There’s a funny scene about this in the movie Bruno.
Are they not already being unreasonable suing a woman for not wanting to wax someone with male genitalia? She runs a beauty shop for women. Men aren’t accommodated. But because this one male who feels female wishes the world would just stop noticing their male organs the shop owner is the one who has to change?
Bethany, I don’t think that your argument holds together here. I think that, starting with the premises that you used to reach a pro-SSM position, Bubby’s argument is correct.
I think that it is the premises that are incorrect, which undermines both arguments.
I think that there is a potentially viable argument that could lead one to approve of SSM but disapprove of transgenderism. The question is the degree of tolerance that we should grant to departures from the societal norm. The societal norm (both morally and numerically) used to be heterosexuality. This remains the numerical norm, but is no longer the moral norm of about 50% of us. Similarly, the societal norm (both morally and numerically) used to be that men should act and dress like men, and women should act and dress like women. This is the norm that is being challenged by the transgender activists.
I think that, in general, it is reasonable to take the position that the extent to which we tolerate a deviation from societal norms is a matter of degree. One could reasonably conclude that homosexuality should be tolerated, while transgenderism should not be tolerated.
By “not tolerated,” I am not advocating something extreme like throwing transgender people in jail. I simply mean that they can be considered as engaging in seriously odd behavior, and that one need not associate with them.
I thought of Karate Kid as soon as I wrote it!
Gender can be socially constructed, but sex is immutable. Transgender people are not really about changing their gender though. They want to change their sex. That is impossible.
I get it. I’m saying going forward, for other beauty shops—a business about which I admit to knowing nothing about—would it be possible to have a male beautician around to handle cases like this?
I don’t think you could create this compromise because the transgendered person who sees himself as a female will want to work with a female like pretty much all females. He will say that he shouldn’t be treated in a different way in any way because he’s a woman, too.
Also, I guess you don’t have to be a woman to wax things; there are male OB/GYNs, but I have never, ever, ever, ever seen a guy doing bikini waxing. And I’ve been to a lot of spas. Ever. Never. Ever.
If spas do this already–have a business engaged in “manscaping” per the needs of men who just don’t like to be hairy, which would not surprise me–then the guy could just go to one of those and leave the poor women the Canadian fellow has been hounding alone. (Those are probably women waxers, too, who are trained differently but billed on menu of options as a different form of waxing.)
This does come back to “making you accept me no matter what.”
It’s like the bakery that must make the cake even though there are twenty other bakeries within three blocks that will make the cake.
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, if you require every shop to have someone capable of addressing this one thing, you are adding cost to everyone else’s wax services because a transgendered person does not drive enough revenue for a full time employee based purely on the number of transgendered people there are in the world.
Milton Friedman would say that business that discriminate don’t make as much money. It would seem that the shop has an incentive, therefore, to serve everyone. When there is a religious reason for denying service to a customer, then the business owner may well choose to hold fast to his beliefs and lose the business. The first amendment protects everyone from being coerced by the government into speech that violates their sincerely held religious beliefs, and in my humble opinion that covers the baker at Masterpiece Cakes. There is no first amendment in Canada. But if this happened in the US and if there were no religious objection, maybe the shop has to find a way to serve the guy.
To serve the guy means learning another skill just for the guy. Therefore, this is kinda like going into a store with carpenters who make cabinets and requiring them to make a table just because you think you’re entitled to a table.
Keep in mind, waxing can be very painful and would be pretty delicate on different genitalia. A person could quite literally hurt the man if serving him as just another client when not trained in waxing that particular body part.
I’m not planning on doing it, believe me.
But then you would be asking a woman to expose her penis to a man even though you do not ask other women to expose their genitals to men. So you would still be discriminating against this lady by not giving her equal treatment.
The waxing? Or the getting waxed? :)
LOL
I see what you’re saying. But I think that we are making assumptions now about how male beauticians gender identify. My point is the guy wants to get waxed. It’s a bit rich for a transgender person to get hung up on who does it. They’re not being denied service. There just happens to be a male doing it.
Roosevelt. It’s a bit rich for a transgendered person to ask for a technician to wax a body part that is peculiar to only that transgendered person while claiming it looks exactly like the body parts normally waxed by the technician because that transgendered person feels that is the case.
My point? In general, there isn’t a lot of logical reasoning going on here on the part of the client.
If the transgendered person has actually transitioned per the plastic surgery required to have the body parts of a woman, then I think that transgendered person should be treated just like every other client.
The problem is not the technician’s beliefs about whether or not a transgendered person has truly changed sex. It’s about the technician’s ability to wax a body part that looks like A instead of B.
The guy doesn’t really want to get waxed. The guy — like the gay couples who seek out Christian-owned bakeries — wants to cause trouble.
At this point I believe he should be waxed, forcibly if necessary. He’s getting waxed.
If I get this right, a transgender asked to have his/her body waxed as if it were a woman’s body which it is not.
In this case, the issue is not what a transgender is called but that he/she was asking for a service not currently provided by the salon and for which the salon personnel had no training, semantics aside. Therefore, since the salon did not have trained personnel for that service and did not advertise or claim that it could service he/she’s needs, his suit should be denied and he/she should be forced to pay the salon’s legal costs. End of story.
The politically correct in government can play with semantics all they want but they cannot change reality and the general public or private businesses should not be forced to pay for their semantics games.
So, he’s actually suing SIXTEEN salons?
NSFW video exposes this pervert for the pervert he is.
You might be right about that. But then the state will simply require the training as a condition for licensure.
You’re right about the logic. And from the perspective of the customer it’s all about preferences.
If we are going to accept that gender is just a preference, it goes for everyone, transgender or not. Nobody, under that reasoning, can make judgments about someone else’s gender, let alone ask. The customer has no right to object to being served by someone who looks to him or her or whatever like a male without objectifying and forcing that person into a gender binary. The customer is hoist on his/her own petard. The transgender argument only works if some people can decide that they can decide for themselves what gender they are (if any) while forcing others to accept a different set of rules. If there’s no gender there’s no gender. The transgender customer who objects to the male-looking beautician just wants, at that particular moment, to be served by someone who looks like a female. It’s just a preference. And that’s not protected by the law. I can’t go to a restaurant and demand to be served by a particular waiter or waitress.
If you can’t make it real, you can at least force everyone you come in contact to say it’s a fact.