“Inside corporate America’s stand against transgender discrimination” (Guardian) says that the one thing nearly all American companies can agree on, aside from wishing that they’d chosen Ireland, Estonia, or Singapore as a corporate home, is that it makes sense to take a break from manufacturing widgets to talk about bathroom and locker room choice in North Carolina.
Politically incorrect commenters (a.k.a. “haters”) sometimes complain that, given the small percentage of the population that is transgender, too much attention is devoted to this topic. I’m wondering if they’ve got this exactly backwards. Perhaps the vogue for transgender rights advocacy can be directly attributed to the small percentage of transgender individuals.
Suppose that a company loudly advocates for the rights of black Americans to earn, on average, the same pay as white Americans. Now all of a sudden people can ask “well, what percentage of your own employees are black and how much do they earn?” (or write articles such as “Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate“) People can go to Wikipedia and learn that roughly 13 percent of Americans are identified as black by the U.S. Census Bureau. Conveniently “the United States Census Bureau and other keepers of official records do not ask about gender identity” (nytimes). So a company can’t be attacked for not having a representative population of employees with respect to transgenderism.
This may be true for individuals. A Massachusetts resident who claims to love and advocate for black Americans could be asked “Census data show that 8.4 percent of your neighbors are black; are 8.4 percent of your friends black?” (Aviation community member response: “Some of my best friends are extremely rich black people.”) Yet a person who signals virtue by claiming to care about the transgendered need not try to find a specific number of transgender friends.
Readers: What do you think? Will it be simpler, especially for a company, to advocate for the rights of a group for which no data exist?
Do you still honestly think that Tim Cook is discriminating based on race?
@Andrew: I think if you replace race with sex in your question, you actually prove Philg’s point
@superMike: sorry, no idea what you mean there.
The whole transgender brouhaha exists because the left is running out of objects for virtue signalling. All the low hanging fruit has been picked. Once victory in World War T is won (the day is fast approaching!) who/what will be next?