We're mostly agreed here. But these solutions are currently of a sort of zero-sum nature and they do not need to be.
Everyone has a right to happiness and safety and we should make sure that one person's rights don't impact another person's - yes, we can absolutely agree on that. A minority of people cannot claim rights that would severly impact the majority... but the concerns for a majority may not be used to suppress the rights of a minority, either. So we need data, we need compromises, we need careful monitoring.
I don't know where you live, but this is an issue in the UK.
Check out this source... you may have to run it through a translator. It addresses exactly the three areas of concern you had mentioned - locker rooms, women's shelters and prisons. All institutions report that it is currently a non-issue and can be solved on a case-by-case basis. German law even has a paragraph concerning prisons already, saying that if the sex or gender of a person is under question, the question on which prison they go to is to be solved on the individual case, no general rule.
Das geplante Selbstbestimmungsgesetz soll es ermöglichen, das Geschlecht im Pass selbst festzulegen. Die Einführung wird von einer teils harschen Debatte begleitet - und der Frage: Sollten auch Transfrauen Zugang zu Frauenbereichen haben? Wie Justiz, Frauenhäuser und Schwimmbäder damit umgehen.
www.hessenschau.de
How many needlessly mutilated gay kids does it take to make a mountain? Not very many in my opinion.
One is too many.
Consider that surgeries don't just happen in the name of trans-sexual transition. there's still the problem of intersex children that get operated on to make them fit better in either the male or female box... usually without asking that child about their wishes.
And for a transsexual child, being denied GAC during puberty, it can be really traumatizing: if you feel your body changing in a way that you don't want it to.
So when it comes to surgeries for minors... there's always a certain chance of getting it wrong. Either you wait to long, and the person is unhappy for the rest of their lives because puberty changed their bodies... or you intervene to early and the person is unhappy when they reconsider their identity.
So my stance on trans kids is actually this:
1. battle gender stereotypes. On this we agreen, I think. If people don't feel like they have to fit into one of two boxes in their behavior, dress etc, then maybe those "tomboys" and "effeminate boys" you are talking about will feel comfortable in their cis identity, and the danger of the "mutilated gay kid", as you so charmingly put it, is reduced... since they feel comfortable to express their gender traits independent of their body. (my wife is a bit like that... she has a lot of behavioral "male" traits, but is quite happy in her female body. And since I don't expect her to be a pretty little housewife it works out fine). It also helps non-binary and intersex people.
2. allow hormone blockers. Those are a great way of postponing a decision without puberty kicking in an driving bodily changes
3. make support and counseling available for both the children and their parents, so that no decision in either direction is being made in haste or under pressure. Decisions should be made on an individual case basis.
4. If in doubt, let the person decide who lives in that body.
None of that means that biological sex is a continuum.
I believe that this is EXACTLY what I was trying to convey?
Imagine, for a simplified model, a line with two markers on it. one marker is is labelled "average female phenotype", the other as "average male phenotype". if you look at where bodies fit on that line, you will find a lot of dots clustered around the two "average" markers, and then a few rarer dots closer to the center.
But it's still simplified, since it can sometimes be very difficult to determine someone's place on that line, or the exact "division point" between male and female, since it is not just one trait you'd measure, but multiple layers (genes, hormones, organs...). Someone with a perfectly male genome can have a female phenotype if their bodies don't recognize testosterone, so the best you could do is "somewhere in the middle or a bit of both"
Voila: continuum.
I agree that phenotypes vary greatly, but that's a different topic.
no, I think that's exactly the relevant topic.
This is clearly a very volatile topic. I sincerely appreciate your civility, I wish other posters were as civil as you.
Thank you, I'm trying.