1. Yes, sports and games are competitive and yes if things are unfair then they are unfair. One of this article's major points was how we can put restrictions on transgender women's transition to prevent any sort of unfairness. That was kind of the only point she put out on the topic of the sports other than just the women are women narrative.
2. Why do you think transgender people generally hold malice towards the general public? Read the responses to this article, look around the internet a bit. I see anti-transgender propoganda all of the time, and it is culturally accepted by many people. Being transphobic right now is like being a racist in the 1900's. Nobody cares that you are transphobic because so many other people are transphobic. It is easy to see why this world where you are both a representative of your population, a defender of your population, and a victim of your population, can be stressful and lead to these sorts of attitudes towards the type of people that perpetuate all of that.
I often like to make comparisons to the black community because unlike transgender people they have had at least a relatively successful civil rights movement in the past. If you were to tell a black person he cannot participate in sports because he is black and he made a post about it online that was a little scathing like this one, would you consider that to be okay?
Imagine experiencing that same discrimination but in the open air. We don't even have anti-discrimination laws in a ridiculous number of states for transgender or gay people. They are trying to repeal gay marriage, and it is also incredibly hard for transgender people to adopt -- even adopting their partner's children. Here's a full overview where you can look at each state to find out more:
https://transgenderlawcenter.org/equalitymap
You don't have civil rights, half the population bullies you and very rarely does anyone do anything about it, you can be evicted, denied housing, denied from public services, and refused custody of a child on the grounds that you are transgender. This is not even to mention the weird looks, creepy people, and fetishization.
3. A bigot is
a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.
Note that this definition means that you can be both prejudiced OR antagonistic. Meaning that your initial response where you said " Are transgender women simply women? I'm not so sure..." could definitely be considered a bigotted phrase by definition, because you are attatched to that belief which is definitely antagonistic and likely prejudice -- although I am not exactly sure if prejudice applies here.
Furthermore, if you have no problem against transgender women, you wouldn't have said that. One more thing, if you want to then convince me that you do have no problem with transgender women after that, call them transgender women, not " women who used to be men." because that is not what they are.
They are women who used to be labeled as men. At some point they were a child and being themselves when someone bullied them to surpress their true gender identity. Like me, one of the first memories I have is dreaming that I was wearing high heels and dresses ALL of the time, this was probably around age 3 or 4. I remember going to kindergarten and being jealous of a girl in my class wearing cute stuff.
This didn't just suddenly happen. I didn't wake up one day and want to become a woman. My entire life before being myself was waiting to be myself.
When you say " women that used to be men," you are implying that transgender women at one point internally identified as a man.
I get that nobody else could understand, and nobody is expecting anyone else to. How could you possibly understand? That is why I am trying to make you aware that what you hate about this article is just a defense mechanism. You need to consider that sometimes flowers grow thorns so that nothing will eat it.
The article also didn't feel much like a tantrum to me. The beginning definitely came off a little rough -- and I definitely am not a big fan of the harsh language used in the article, but no one here went on an angry rant really... Most of it was just her saying that if other people are transphobic they should work on that instead of being indifferent to it and change policy based on prejudice instead of reality. That's just my take, anyway.
Regardless, I hope you have a good day, and I hope that maybe sharing my experience and my views objectively on these things has at least opened up some path of empathy where you can understand that just being in any part of the United States that isn't an extremely liberal (and expensive) city is absolutely exhausting as a transgender person.
