"trans women are women and deserve all the same rights as women" is a phrase that sounds really pretty in the abstract dealing with perfect platonic forms, but gets real complicated when rubber meets road and you actually have policies that apply to real people.
Is bicycle with an electric motor a motor vehicle? In a world of platonic forms, you could perhaps say that an electric bike is a motor vehicle and should have all the same rights as a car or motorcycle. But then you get into the nitty-gritty of actually doing something like that, and things start to get very hairy very fast. Bike riders aren't licensed, they don't have to go through any particular training or testing, bicycles can't go as fast as a car, they don't typically have a headlight, they don't typically have signal lamps, they almost universally aren't insured, and so on.
So what this means is that in practice, while you can make an argument that a bicycle with an electric motor is a motor vehicle, and it's reasonable to give access to some streets in a limited manner, you can't say that a bicycle with a motor has the same attributes as a car or motorcycle, doesn't have the same powers, doesn't have the same responsibilities, and thus can't have fully equal rights.
And that goes both ways too. In my analogy, you will be in huge trouble if you drive your car down a sidewalk, or down a walking trail, or drive on the road without a license or without insurance. So you can't argue that because a bicycle with an electric motor is a motor vehicle that the car gets equal rights with the bicycle.
That doesn't mean that you ban bicycles, that doesn't mean that you unreasonably restrict bicycles, it doesn't mean that you unreasonably restrict cars or motorcycles. It does mean that a bicycle with an electric motor isn't a car.
Even if you can bully someone into saying it is, merely redrawing the map does not change the territory. You can draw 1000 lakes on a map of a desert, that does not mean the real world will morph into what you have drawn. Regardless of what the postmodernists would like to think, the real world is the final arbiter of truth, not human beings. Real world actions driven by convincing others to do things in the real world can of course change the world, if you convince a bunch of people to head out and dig a bunch of irrigation channels then a desert can be changed into arable farmland, but no amount of pure rhetoric and convincing others will
by itself change a desert into a wetland.
Is bicycle with an electric motor a motor vehicle? In a world of platonic forms, you could perhaps say that an electric bike is a motor vehicle and should have all the same rights as a car or motorcycle. But then you get into the nitty-gritty of actually doing something like that, and things start to get very hairy very fast. Bike riders aren't licensed, they don't have to go through any particular training or testing, bicycles can't go as fast as a car, they don't typically have a headlight, they don't typically have signal lamps, they almost universally aren't insured, and so on.
So what this means is that in practice, while you can make an argument that a bicycle with an electric motor is a motor vehicle, and it's reasonable to give access to some streets in a limited manner, you can't say that a bicycle with a motor has the same attributes as a car or motorcycle, doesn't have the same powers, doesn't have the same responsibilities, and thus can't have fully equal rights.
And that goes both ways too. In my analogy, you will be in huge trouble if you drive your car down a sidewalk, or down a walking trail, or drive on the road without a license or without insurance. So you can't argue that because a bicycle with an electric motor is a motor vehicle that the car gets equal rights with the bicycle.
That doesn't mean that you ban bicycles, that doesn't mean that you unreasonably restrict bicycles, it doesn't mean that you unreasonably restrict cars or motorcycles. It does mean that a bicycle with an electric motor isn't a car.
Even if you can bully someone into saying it is, merely redrawing the map does not change the territory. You can draw 1000 lakes on a map of a desert, that does not mean the real world will morph into what you have drawn. Regardless of what the postmodernists would like to think, the real world is the final arbiter of truth, not human beings. Real world actions driven by convincing others to do things in the real world can of course change the world, if you convince a bunch of people to head out and dig a bunch of irrigation channels then a desert can be changed into arable farmland, but no amount of pure rhetoric and convincing others will
by itself change a desert into a wetland.
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