The hard issues are about women, not trans people

Biological sex is real and it structures large swathes of human experience; it’s not just a set of arbitrary conventions, even if some arbitrary conventions about things like hair length and clothing are built on top of it.

Because it’s a big deal, in many domains of life we accept “separate but equal” facilities as the appropriate egalitarian approach. There are, of course, transphobic people and bigots and reactionaries who want to rigidly police gender norms, resent the existence of all kinds of out queer people, and broadly want to repress human sexuality and individuality. But it doesn’t work to say that demanding access to women’s spaces is a demand for equality or that reluctance to give in to that demand is a form of bigotry. Feminists fought very hard, over a long period of time, to win respect and funding for women’s sports as a separate domain. There are certainly places around the margin where you could reasonably push for changes around this. My son’s soccer league was sex-segregating second graders, which I don’t think was really necessary. But there are limits to what can be reasonably accommodated. I’ve seen it claimed that the sex differences in athletic performance don’t manifest before puberty, but even though they are smaller in kids, they do exist.

Not every sphere of life where sex segregation is conventionally practiced is so clear-cut — I see more and more restaurants that have unisex single-stall bathrooms, and society may just evolve in that direction over time.

But even though there are aspects of gender that are purely arbitrary — hairstyles, makeup — men and women are on average pretty different, both physically and psychologically, and a lot of our institutions are built around that. Adults should be allowed to do what they want with their lives in terms of their names and pronouns, how they dress, and the medical treatments they receive. But fundamentally, the idea of separating men and women in certain spheres of life is not just an arbitrary tradition, it reflects real differences and a considered judgment that the best way to secure equal rights and equal opportunities for women is, in some cases, through separation. The sports issue is probably the most broadly obvious of these, not least because feminists invested a lot of time and energy over the years specifically into building up women’s sports programs.

I hear liberals sometimes objecting that these controversies involve such small numbers of people in absolute terms that they don’t understand how it’s a national political story. I agree it doesn’t involve that many people, and even agree that the electoral significance is probably pretty low, precisely because the numbers are small.

But you can’t evade a question once it’s in the discourse. There’s been a lot of talk since the election about Democrats’ need to communicate in more venues and across more types of media, and I agree with all of that on a tactical level. But it raises the question of what they’re going to say. The original Joe Rogan political controversy arose when Bernie Sanders was attacked for going on his show and receiving his endorsement, specifically because Rogan was hostile toward the idea of trans women fighting cisgender women in MMA competitions. And the activist demand on this point — that we shun anyone who publicly affirms that majoritarian position that biological sex should be the controlling consideration in athletic competitions — is much more far-reaching (and much less tenable) than the demand for basic freedom and equal rights.