ScotL wrote: ↑Thu Oct 06, 2022 10:17 amBut to state that breaking these laws means you have to self-identify as anything is not true. You alone control how you identify.
We seem to have a communications problem here. There are no
laws that I am aware of in any reasonable jurisdiction that states whatever men or women should wear other than to cover certain parts of their bodies. Legislatures, courts, and sometimes communities make those, with the last usually known as "bylaws".
In the case of Virgin Atlantic, we have a private employer establishing
rules of conduct which are quite different than
laws as above. If you don't like the terms, you don't have to work for that employer. Full stop. From appearances, the Virgin rules state something akin to, "flight crews may choose which uniform option is closer to their alignment". Note that is says precisely
nothing about
style choice -- it's about
alignment. The implication there is that even if
you don't tick the "trans-*" box on the HR forms it will be ticked
for you if you adopt the skirted option -- which no straight guy is going to go for.
Until recent times, the common belief was you were male or you were female and there was no other. This myth was somewhat acknowledged to be incorrect with tomboys. But tomboys strive to be more like a man and masculine qualities were generally celebrated. The reality is history shows us that people have been identifying on the spectrum of male to female forever, we just didn’t recognize it and didn’t allow them to be themselves. So they hid it.
Nice thesis, but it fails to take into account the overall hardening of viewpoints and "allowed" behaviours that's been happening in the last 40+ years. How do I know? I've been watching it for all that time, and not much liking what I've seen. Men are now "toxic" and feared (at at the very least reviled) and been shoved off into the far corner of society, and that is starting to come home to roost in the forms of all manner of grotesque behaviours.
I was raised in a family of stoics; the only one who really showed any emotion at all was my grandmother (bless her heart!); the guys (my grandfather and my father) kept it hidden, but I happen to know that they felt the entire range of human emotion. How do I know that they felt it? Because every once in a while they'd crack and some of it'd show. Relating a bit how, in the very early 1980s -- before the worst of the societal rot was setting in -- my grandfather needed to get angioplasty (back when they were still doing it without stents) done because of heart problems and, in spite of being an MD of some renown, was terrified by the prospect. My dad picked up on this, and one time actually broke down in my arms crying over it. So much for stoicism, and had they spoken of it earlier things would have been a Hell of a lot easier. Finally, my grand-dad was admitted to a hospital in Boston about a block north of the one he helped run from the '50s to the late '70s, and as I was working a lot in Boston at the time visited him every day in hospital to cheer him up and calm him down a bit; being the emotional one in the family (having rejected the Stoic ideals early on) I was the logical one for the job. He was released and came home three days later, and nobody -- even once -- gave me crap for being "high strung" and "emotional" again. I used my tool-set to its utmost that time, and face it, emotion -- like intellect -- is little more than a tool in the kit. If you don't have the full range, you're missing something important. It's not just for the gals, no matter what the radical "feminists" will try telling you.