I left for a bit and there’s a lot to address here.
It is actually “Bra” or “Brah”, not bro. I never say bro. LOL
@CoronaZombie who are you kidding with this argument? Brah comes from bro, don’t feign ignorance.
We’ve seen this in Canada recently with laws to compel speech. It really is quite authoritarian and unacceptable in my eyes. I understand people get offended, but honestly…so what? Anything could offend someone, and we can’t nerf the world. We really need to teach our kids to have thicker skin. People can say a lot of things about me, but they can’t say daddy raised a lil b**ch.
I live in Canada. Bill C-16 is a protection law. It protects non-binary people from being discriminated against and harassed. To quote the wikipedia article:
An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (Bill C-16, 2016) is a law passed by the Parliament of Canada. The law adds gender expression and gender identity as protected grounds to the Canadian Human Rights Act , and also to the Criminal Code provisions dealing with hate propaganda, incitement to genocide, and aggravating factors in sentencing.
This does not affect you or your speech, personally. It makes it illegal to not employ someone, fire someone, deny them housing, or services based on their gender identity or expression. I doubt you would do this, personally.
It also adds gender identity and expression to the law that protects people from hate speech, which is specifically advocating genocide, or inciting hatred or violence, against a protected group of people. This is NOT casual misgendering.
According to legal experts, not using preferred pronouns would not meet legal standards for hate speech.
There it is, in black and white.
I also want to address the idea that gender is psychological and not biological. This is not entirely true. We know from certain unethical studies that gender cannot be forcefully changed. Conversion therapy does not work. Being transgender also seems to be genetic, according to twin studies. My belief is that gender is a combination of psychological and biological. Gender is a feeling, but cannot be changed.
I’ve been told “sex is your genitals and gender is how you identify” so please note that’s the premise i’m Working under.
Let’s address this one. It is generally understood in transgender activism that sex is just gender disguised as medicine. But that this is the most simple way to explain gender to non-trans people. Let’s break this down. Male and female are names we give two distinct body types. However, not every person is born fitting perfectly into one or the other. About 1 in 1500 - 1 in 2000 babies are born not fitting perfectly into one or the other. Even more people do not even know they have differences until later in life. Including the second group, the number rises to 1 in 60. So, really, giving someone a sex at birth is a guessing game.
And at the end of day, it doesn’t say much to a medical professional. For example, a transgender woman can’t be given the same care as a non-transgender man, even though both are biologically male. This is because hormones and surgeries changes their needs. Knowing sex doesn’t help a doctor do their job. It is simply not enough.
At the end of the day, sex doesn’t tell us anything about our character, how we want to be treated, how we want to be referred to, and it doesn’t help a medical professional treat us.
Are waxers in Canada being forced to wax penises? No, they are not. A trans woman called several bikini waxing places to see if she could get hers done, and she mentioned outright that she was transgender, and had different stuff down there. Every salon was given a choice. The problem was she couldn’t find anyone to do it. Not a single one. The problem is that the salons offered women pubic waxing and she is a woman and couldn’t find any one to do it.
@genderfluid1 Instead of looking this up you assumed that a transgender woman was trying to trick poor innocent women into touching ding dongs. This is unfortunately a stereotype that trans women have to deal with all the time. They are frequently assumed that they want to deceive people, hence the phrase “trap.”
@sammantixbb is actually the one in the right here. There’s a muslim barbershop that hired a woman to do women’s hair, as muslim men cannot touch women’s hair. The answer is to be accommodating, not discriminatory.
