Generally speaking, bigoted speech should be disqualifying. Now, people may not recognize transphobia as bigoted, but I personally consider it bigoted.
The Klans members have been removed from public office for the most part, and forced to live in the shadows. I think the social movement to become more inclusive requires us to expand beyond just shunning racism, but also expand towards shunning homophobia, transphobia, and islamaphobia.
I think "ThreadOfRain" has a good point above: if one speaker is publicly and openly transphobic, perhaps that would be reason enough to disqualify them (akin to how we disqualify other public speakers for being racists). I don't know much about this particular "Kay Coles James" person however, so I dunno whether or not those tweets have a greater context. But it doesn't look good IMO.
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I'd like to think there are plenty of conservative speakers who aren't Transphobic, who would likely be a better rolemodel to fit on the AI Council.
Its no different than calling for the removal of an open racist from a position of power. The main difference is that transphobia is still a gray area, while racism is more or less a settled debate.
Unless racism is rooted out and specifically shunned, it will continue to exist. That's the main lesson from the civil rights movement. Today's battleground is Transgender people and Homosexuality.
> Wouldn't that also disqualify those who who call for her removal or is that an acceptable type of bigotry?
Just from a utilitarian perspective: what are we gaining by allowing transphobia to propagate in society? In my eyes, transphobia offers nothing of benefit to our society, so we should shun it and clamp it down.
Just as racism doesn't offer anything good to our society, transphobia doesn't seem to offer any real benefits. So lets get rid of it.
You're talking two different things here and trying to equate it as one in the same.
I have no idea who this lady is other than what was posted in the article. I read the tweets posted above and I see it as being a big leap to being transphobic by definition. Her concerns/points are valid and that view is shared by a lot of women. Many take those concerns not because of someone who is transgender, but those would would/might abuse the equality hospitality for their own ill reasons.
The first tweet is about a law I haven't researched and don't understand. So I'm going to have to reserve judgement on it. The 2nd tweet however, seems to fall into the category of transphobia to me.
> If [The United Nations] can change the definition of women to include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically.
Please, explain to me how a Trans-woman would "erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically". And do your best to not be Transphobic in your response.
This is already an issue in that the author of the post refuses to call a Trans-woman a Trans-woman... but instead prefers to call them a man. So the Twitter post is already implicitly transphobic.
The scientific understanding of gender, transgender, and sex has greatly improved in just the last 30 years. Unfortunately, the old concepts of male and female are now outdated in the face of modern science.
These are the bodies that the creator have given us. Yes, I'm religious, and I do believe that we must accept the bodies and the facts-of-the-bodies that we were created with. By studying sexuality and gender, new medical understandings have come about. There is more than just Male (XY) and Female (XX), there's a spectrum in between due to medical mysteries (from chromosome mutations, like Klinefelter syndrome XXY chromosomes... to the "guevedoce" (Translation: Penis at 12) born-females who turn into males at the age of 12ish.
There's just a lot of weird medical stuff and mysteries that happen in this world.
Its hard to argue with how God created us. It seems like the best plan moving forward is to accept these ambiguous gendered people and study them... and accept them for how they are.
Still not seeing how her tweet(s) is transphobic. You might as well quote the whole tweet though if you're going to pull out part to show she said man vs trans-women since provides contexts as to why she used that term.
"Redefining of sex" was stated right before the use of man not gender. As I understood it sex does not equal gender given the new belief. If they are the same to my understanding there has been no link to sex chromosomes mutations and trans. Those mutations are at best 1.2% of the total population and vary in severity. Even that entire 1.2% probably doesn't fully represent the trans community.
I don't think she was making statement at all that transgender doesn't exists in nature. Her tweets read to have more to do with one many women see as a valid concern men transitioning (or just saying they are with no intent to truly do so) to being a women to take advantage of a situation that may cause harm to women identified at birth.
> Her tweets read to have more to do with one many women see as a valid concern men transitioning (or just saying they are with no intent to truly do so) to being a women to take advantage of a situation that may cause harm to women identified at birth.
Can you elaborate on how a transwoman can harm ciswomen? Because I'm personally not seeing any way to answer that question specifically without making some kind of trans-phobic assumption.
"Economically and Socially harm" is the one I'm most interested in. I can maybe see an argument for sports, but that's barely an economic or social issue IMO. The tweet says "Economic, Social, and Political" harm, which is quite a powerful statement!
> "Redefining of sex" was stated right before the use of man not gender
Honestly, I haven't kept up with the internet on this whole thing. I'm mostly working off of psychology that I've studied roughly 15 years ago in high school. So forgive me if I'm not fully remembering all medical details of transsexuals.
I too don't really understand the "sex vs gender" words. But I don't really care too much about those details.
> Those mutations are at best 1.2% of the total population and vary in severity. Even that entire 1.2% probably doesn't fully represent the trans community.
USA has 300,000,000 people. Even a 0.1% statistic becomes 300,000 people. If a small class of people are living an uncomfortable life, and all we have to do to make them feel better is call them "she" or "he" (or whatever they prefer... whether or not they have Adam's apples or whatever), I'm more or less willing to give that to them.
Its basically no cost to me, or anybody really. And it improves the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Now, it seems to me that you're trying to tell me that treating transpeople with respect has a social cost. What I'm trying to do is get you to tell me what that social cost is exactly, because I'm frankly not seeing it.
The heritability of a trait is generally considered an estimation of the importance of genetic factors to that trait. For example, the heritability of athletic status (regardless of sport) is estimated to be 66% (4). Height, which is critical for success in some sports, is highly heritable, with about 80% of the variation due to genetic factors (5). Body type (having mesomorphic or ectomorphic somatotype) is also highly heritable (6). These somatotypes are classically associated with power or endurance athlete status, respectively (7).
Costa et al. (8) recently reviewed the existing family and twin studies related to specific endurance and muscular strength phenotypes. Aerobic endurance, as reflected by VO2max has a heritability of about 50% (9). Heritability estimates for muscular strength, and power range from 30 to 83%, depending on the specific muscle and type of contraction (8).
As a personal opinion, the reason why sport is split on gender is because of the spectators. You get more women to watch sport if you have a women sport team. You do not get more short people to watch sport by splitting the teams based on height. Thus we split on gender. It has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with money.
No, I'm saying there are lots of people to advocate for "conservative" American perspectives. And therefore these perspectives listed here should make you ask whether you can find another candidate for a high level position.
With regards to disqualifying criteria, you might find this interesting:
You can always find people with the exact perspectives that you're looking for. I suggest the smaller the number, the better, and the fewer of these "boards" the better. The ultimate goal is to get as close to the one person that has a perfect set of perspectives on all topics, so that you can safely entrust that person to make the right decisions on everything. In the meantime the rest of us can go fishing.
I'm getting the impression that you believe that having that opinion on that topic should disqualify someone from any important role. Am I correct?
The basic point seems to be that independent of her opinions (e.g. "The Equality Act is overreach because...") -- the content of what she disseminates (as exemplified in the tweets above) is plainly hysterical and disconnected from reality.
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108768455141007360
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497