There's something came up in one of my hobbies I found interesting.
So, FIRST Robotics runs high school robotics competitions. Although lots of schools sponsor teams as student activities, it actually has nothing to do with schools. FIRST is a private not-for-profit 501 c(3). Some teams are "community teams" not affiliated with any school
A couple of weeks ago, one of the mentors (adult volunteers) posted a message to our forum asking for advice about a situation. The team was an all girls' team. At the beginning of the school year, a boy they knew announced he was really a girl, and she wanted to join the team. The trans-girl had undergone no chemical or surgical alteration at this time, and expressed that she actually never intended to do so.
The general consensus was "no problem". It's not like boys have some natural advantage. Everyone should be allowed to participate. Join the team. If anyone on the forum said otherwise, their posts must have been removed. I didn't see any dissent from the position. (There were references to an unusually high number of posts being removed from that thread, but no details on why.)
One other aspect of FIRST is that competitions last 2-4 days, and are often far enough away that the team stays in hotels, sharing rooms. Now what? On this subject, there was considerably more dissent. The most common suggestion was to get her her own room, but many people said that would be unfair to her, treating her differently than the other girls. Others objected, for all the reasons you might expect, to the idea of her sharing a hotel room with cis-girls.
One aspect of the debate really stood out for me, and it's related to the "definition" discussion. You see, there's a group of people that, as a father, I'm interested in. What I mean is that they are of concern to me. I don't know exactly what to call these people these days. Since we're talking about Robotics here, I'll describe this group in mathematical terms. I am referring to:
The set of all teenagers who could make my daughter pregnant.
In ancient days, we used to call that set "boys". It seems like that set is pretty significant, and yet we don't seem to have a name for them anymore. Anyway, it's just an idea. Linguistics. Word games. Semantics. I guess. Yeah.
Another thing that struck me as odd was that there were some people who were not so keen on the trans-girl bunking with the cis girls. They brought up the possibility that "something could happen". Lots of people jumped all over this and noted that "something could happen" whenever same-sex people shared a hotel room, and they tended to chastise the complainers for being homophobic by not recognizing the possibility that sexual things could go on among same sex roommates. The objectors, though, noted that while it was always true that "something could happen" between two girls sharing a room, in the usual situations that wouldn't involve having to buy diapers.
In general, anyone who brought such things up (I abstained from that conversation) was criticized for attacking the trans-girl, assuming that just because she was trans she was going to do something awful. I thought that was really, really, weird. What the objectors were actually saying was that the trans-girl was normal in at least one sense. She, like most teenagers, probably thought about sex a lot, and maybe even wanted to have sex. Her sexual orientation was probably not known to the mentor and certainly wasn't discussed in the thread, except by a few as a hypothetical. Somehow, it just seemed like the supporters of trans-cis roommate pairs were insisting that, alone of all their species, trans people would certainly never engage in sexual activity on a high school trip. Sure, cis-people might do that, but to say a trans-person might was, it seemed, akin to calling them perverts. How dare anyone suggest that such a thing could take place?
If the truth be told, I think most of the time you could throw one cis boy in with three cis girls in a hotel room, and nothing would happen. They would change into sweats and t-shirts in the bathroom, and there would be just as many virgins in the morning as there had been in the evening. Since we're talking Robotics kids, the probabilities go up even higher. I don't think the trans-girl is any more likely to "do anything" than anyone else, but I also don't think she's less likely.
People were awfully guarded on that forum. We try to avoid politics, but it does come up sometimes. Even the tame descriptions above were more "reading between the lines" noting what was implied by what they said. Few people wanted to be blunt. And the thread was shut down after about a week of very heavy activity. A lot more people talked about that thread than the thread about which DC motors best suited for drive trains.
Well, that's all for now. You can imagine what my thoughts were on the subject, but you'll have to. I bring it up just another example of the kinds of questions we face in the 21st century.
ETA: In real life, I don't have a daughter. To the best of my knowledge, my only child is male, both in sex and gender. The concept of a daughter was brought up as an illustration of thoughts that might be expressed by fathers of daughters.
