If the LGBT editor at Think Progress can’t manage to come up with a reasonable definition of who is and is not transgendered, then how is a gym manager supposed to do it? Or a police officer responding to complaints from women? Ford’s certainty that the person in the image is not a transgender woman is laughable. The idea that he can look at someone and on that basis determine his or her gender is literally the opposite of what he has been saying for years.
The simple fact is that Ford and his allies in the fight for transgender access to bathrooms and locker rooms do not have the slightest idea who is and who is not trans. They never have. This has always been sophistry. This has always been an attempt to legitimize a delusion. This has always been an effort to pigeonhole men and women into gender stereotypes. Today, inadvertently, Ford proved it.
So, just to recap. Things that make you a man: Facial hair. Short hair. Arm hair. A man’s watch. Things that don’t make you a man: Having a penis.
There’s no explaining why North Carolina restrooms, of all things, ended up being the battlefield on which this particular skirmish in the culture war is being fought. It’s just one of those emergent properties of complex phenomena which no one could have chosen or predicted. The virtue signaling of progressives is of course ridiculous, as is their opponents’ attempt to conjure up viscerally shocking (if highly unlikely) scenarios, like creepy male predators taking advantage of trans acceptance to kidnap and molest young girls at interstate rest stops. Nevertheless, however clownish the details may be, this is at bottom a fundamental argument over whether we share a common reality or not, and as such, it’s one well worth having.