Can We Discuss Sex & Gender / Transgender People?

[Loren Pechtel]

Going back to the original question: How can they be independent when we see an obvious link? Remember what statisticians keep hammering: Correlation does not prove causation. The classic example is ice cream sales are strongly correlated with rape numbers. Does ice cream make people commit rape??

No, what's going on in most of these cases is that they are independent of each other but both are related to something else. (In the classic example, the weather.)

The human body is an absolute hodge-podge of rube goldberg engineering. I'm a software engineer--if someone were to propose a software layout half as crazy as the human body I would tear the proposal up after reading the first few pages and investigate why we had an employee like that in the first place.

The only reason we exist at all is that there is an awful lot of fault tolerance in biological systems.

In this particular case we have testosterone and similar hormones running around turning on a bunch of "male" systems and turning off corresponding "female" systems in the developing embryo. It doesn't always work right, though--sometimes systems aren't turned on properly. Lets consider a simple case where we have a decent amount of data on how things go wrong: Do you have a dick?

XX: No make-a-dick message is sent.
XY: The make-a-dick message is sent:
Swyer syndrome: The person is insensitive to all types of testosterone. The result is apparently female but likely with fertility issues.
5α-Reductase 2 deficiency: The person is insensitive to dihydrotestosterone but responds normally to testosterone. The result is they look nearly female at birth but will grow a dick at puberty.
Neither of these: born with a dick.

One system, two different documented failure methods in addition to the correct operation.

Given that we have a decent number of people who feel their mind doesn't match their body that strongly suggests to me that there is a separate system for how the mind works from how the body works.

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

 

[Generation55]

Going back to the original question: How can they be independent when we see an obvious link? Remember what statisticians keep hammering: Correlation does not prove causation. The classic example is ice cream sales are strongly correlated with rape numbers. Does ice cream make people commit rape??

No, what's going on in most of these cases is that they are independent of each other but both are related to something else. (In the classic example, the weather.)

The human body is an absolute hodge-podge of rube goldberg engineering. I'm a software engineer--if someone were to propose a software layout half as crazy as the human body I would tear the proposal up after reading the first few pages and investigate why we had an employee like that in the first place.

The only reason we exist at all is that there is an awful lot of fault tolerance in biological systems.

In this particular case we have testosterone and similar hormones running around turning on a bunch of "male" systems and turning off corresponding "female" systems in the developing embryo. It doesn't always work right, though--sometimes systems aren't turned on properly. Lets consider a simple case where we have a decent amount of data on how things go wrong: Do you have a dick?

XX: No make-a-dick message is sent.
XY: The make-a-dick message is sent:
Swyer syndrome: The person is insensitive to all types of testosterone. The result is apparently female but likely with fertility issues.
5α-Reductase 2 deficiency: The person is insensitive to dihydrotestosterone but responds normally to testosterone. The result is they look nearly female at birth but will grow a dick at puberty.
Neither of these: born with a dick.

One system, two different documented failure methods in addition to the correct operation.

Given that we have a decent number of people who feel their mind doesn't match their body that strongly suggests to me that there is a separate system for how the mind works from how the body works.

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

But this doesn't explain why there are trans women who don't mind having a penis and trans men who don't mind having a vagina. There are trans people like you say who hate their bodies and wish the body was different, but there are some who are fine with their genitals. Why is this so?

I still don't think you have explained the contradiction. I understand correlation does not equal causation as you said. However, the phrases "sex and gender are different" and "my sex and gender are the same" is still a contradiction that needs to be resolved.

For example, consider this convo:

Person A: My sex and gender are the same.
Person B: Of course. Sex and gender are the same thing.
Person C: My sex and gender are different.
Person B: Of course. Sex and gender are different.

You also (but not just you) also ignored my point about David Reimer. He had a botched circumcision that severely injured his penis. The psychologist John Money said, "Since sex and gender different, just raise him as a girl. It won't matter." It didn't work and he committed suicide later in life. This shows that sex and gender are the same thing. If they were different, he would've had no problem being a girl.

It just feels strange to say, "My gender matches my sex" as if there's suposed to a "right way" for it to be. But as I said before, trans people say there is no right way to be a man or woman. But by using the label "transgender" it implies that there is a right way to be a man or a woman. If sex and gender are different, there should be no way it should even be possible to utter the phrase "my sex and gender are the same."

Let me see if I can try to explain it better and more clearly. if someone says, "I have a penis but I wish I didn't and I'm a trans woman," this implies that a penis is supposed to be a man's organ. If someone says, "I have a vagina but I wish I didn't and I'm a trans man," this implies that a vagina is supposed to be a woman's organ. But, why are these organs supposed to be a man's or woman's organ if sex and gender are different?

Or to put it simpler which I just thought of: A baby is a born with a penis. What gender is supposed to "match" this penis organ? How and why do you know?

 

[Melange_Thief]

First, a note on quotes: The new multiquote thing is really nice! Though I'd like an easy way to get rid of quote pyramids somehow.

But whoever has suggested pulling down somebody's pants? This red herring gets brought up repeatedly, but why?

People keep bringing it up for two simple reasons:

1. Trans-skeptics posit that it's so utterly important to link the pronouns and gender terms one uses for a person with what sex chromosomes/genitalia they have that it's important to ignore a trans person's preferences when it conflicts with said chromosomes and/or genitalia.
2. People like my friend, who you would not consider a man but who nonetheless so closely resembles one such that all the people I know who know him have never once questioned whether he has the right downstairs equipment for the word man, exist and get treated as the gender they identify as rather than the one traditionally required to correspond to his genitalia.

If 1. is so important, then it must be imperative that 2. get resolved, and there's only one clear, if very intrusive, way to do that. Alternatively, if it's not so important to link pronouns to the dangles in one's pants that we must violate their privacy, then why do we need to make it an issue at all?

What makes you think they did not know this person was trans? I mean: you claim you didn't know, but are you generalising your experience to other people? Or are you claiming that people already include the conception of 'trans man' in their definition of 'men', so that's how they saw them already?

Without getting too deep into specifics, there was a straight, very Christian woman in our group who had pretty different ways of treating men and women, and belonged to a very conservative variety of the religion. She, uh, quite distinctly treated my friend as a man rather than as a woman. We didn't specifically discuss LGBT issues with her, admittedly, but other matters we discussed made it clear that she followed a fairly standard theologically conservative form of Protestantism so it was at least a fair assumption that she would not have been hitting on my friend if she'd thought he was trans.

If you don't want to hear them then you don't want to hear them. I too am uninterested in engaging with somebody uninterested in engaging with me.

And yet you did. (And here I am, unable to resist the urge to answer a handful of things you brought up in spite of knowing exactly how little this engagement is worth. [insert deep sigh here])

This already begs the question: why are 'man', 'woman', 'she', etc 'gender' words? What makes them gender words and not sex words? I have not seen, in any medium, common usage of the term 'gender' to apply to humans before the 1960s. 'Man' and 'woman' are sex terms that have 'human' and 'maturity' as part of their definition. 'He' and 'she' are gender words for nouns (in languages where gendered nouns are a thing), but they were always words to describe sex for humans and other animals.

I mean, so what? This isn't hard to work out on one's own. Anglophone societies didn't make a distinction between one's sex and the social role one was expected to fulfill based on sex, but then it turned out that one's ability to wear pants, among other such gender segregated stupidia, wasn't hindered by the lack of a penis or the presence of a vagina, so now we need some way of distinguishing between the actual literal physical differences and the random BS society arbitrarily assigned according to those. Let me be clear: The vast majority of, and possibly all, gender-based differences in our culture are, in my eyes, not things that should be determined by dangly parts and therefore, in my eyes, it's stupid to be emotionally attached to segregating such things based on dangly parts. The fact that some of my ancestors were too thoroughly plumbing the depths of their own intestinal cavities to realize that it's ok for skirt-like garments to clad non-Scottish penises as well as Scottish ones does not create some moral profundity to their inability to distinguish between gender and sex. I mean, certain of the ancients made no category distinction between the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; are we supposed to ignore, now that we can actually go to those places, that they're wildly and radically different things and not just lights going around the sky just because their opinion is older? I am being somewhat flippant here because I am rather tired of this thoroughly debunked notion that we should do things the same way people in the past did them because those past people did them that way.

And what's more, you are correct to note that "he" and "she" refer to grammatical gender in languages with grammatical gender. What you should learn now is that the fact that we have "he," "she," and "it" in English means that, in fact, English has grammatical gender too. That's right, all our nouns are gendered. All of them. It's just that the vast majority - BUT NOT ALL - of our inanimate nouns are neuter gender. Furthermore, it is thoroughly acceptable to use the neuter pronoun with babies and with animals, even animals whose gender we can determine easily (e.g. "I saw a buck in my yard, but it ran away when it say me" is a perfectly grammatical sentence in English). The word "ship" and words for countries are, at least in prestige varieties of English, gendered feminine, and yet I've yet to see a single ship's blueprint with the ship's vagina labeled. These are not patterns you would find if pronoun choice were conditioned based on sex, so all anti-trans arguments based on pronouns need to go pound sand already.

Though you are also silent on the demands of neopronouns--of which there is a vast array. Are the neopronouns also all legitimate, and we have 'zero' reasons to not use them?

Now, this comment here is literally the reason I bothered responding to anything you wrote at all because I have some things to say about neopronouns. I am not, in principle, against neopronouns. If someone can make a neopronoun that can catch on really easily, great! I'll jump right on board! I am, however, against neopronouns made by people who have no idea how pronouns work in speech. Pronouns are very frequently used bits of language, so they need to be phonologically simple and have obvious reduced forms (that's forms pronounced with unstressed vowels) that don't end up sounding like other pronouns. The neopronouns I've run into in my time here on Earth fail spectacularly at those tasks. For instance, some people have proposed "hir" as an object form of a new pronoun, but there's just no way to reduce that without making it sound exactly like "her"! Like literally, what was even the point of coining a gender neutral pronoun if it's just going to end up sounding exactly like a gendered one that already exists?! Or are we supposed to pronounce it as /hɪr/, with full stress, every time we say it? "Zir" is a little better, but spelling-wise it doesn't pattern well with the other pronouns (a problem it shares with "hir"), and something just feels unnatural about having a /z/ in there.

Having said that, I'm not positive neopronouns are actually solving an unsolved problem. "They" has a very long history of being used as a gender neutral pronoun for individual humans and is still used as such today, and using it for non-binary individuals just isn't a huge leap for me. It seems to me that the primary impetus for making a separate gender neutral pronoun from singular "they" is an erroneous belief that there's something bad about using singular "they", and there is very little I hate more than the stupid forms of grammatical prescriptivism we've inherited from folks with a hardcore Latin fetish. But even so, if someone can come up with a neopronoun that isn't pretty objectively a bad fit for English phonotactics, then I'm totally on board.

But of course, you weren't really asking if neopronouns were made by people with a grasp on how people actually use pronouns on a phonological level. You're trying to see if I consider it bigotry not to use them. My answer is: If you are not using them because you dislike the concept of non-binary people or the idea of not using a person's preferred pronouns, then that's a shitty reason to avoid them. Even if I run into someone who wants me to use "hir" for hir, even though that pronoun is objectively poorly designed for its intended function, I will make a good faith effort to use it.

Trans activists demand we supplant sex for gender in nearly every conceivable situation. And the transformation of language is a step in that process: if you are treating trans women as women for language purposes, then they must also be women for all purposes.

Sounds fine to me. Language is transforming anyway, we might as well change it in a way that makes it suck less for trans folks too.

 

[Metaphor]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

 

[Metaphor]

People keep bringing it up for two simple reasons:

1. Trans-skeptics posit that it's so utterly important to link the pronouns and gender terms one uses for a person with what sex chromosomes/genitalia they have that it's important to ignore a trans person's preferences when it conflicts with said chromosomes and/or genitalia.

Non. Pronouns are sexed, not gendered. You are begging the question.

2. People like my friend, who you would not consider a man but who nonetheless so closely resembles one such that all the people I know who know him have never once questioned whether he has the right downstairs equipment for the word man, exist and get treated as the gender they identify as rather than the one traditionally required to correspond to his genitalia.

I would not consider any female a man, no matter what they did to their bodies, because men are adult human males, and no mammal can change sex. And I doubt--very much doubt--this person closely resembles a man when naked.

Without getting too deep into specifics, there was a straight, very Christian woman in our group who had pretty different ways of treating men and women, and belonged to a very conservative variety of the religion. She, uh, quite distinctly treated my friend as a man rather than as a woman. We didn't specifically discuss LGBT issues with her, admittedly, but other matters we discussed made it clear that she followed a fairly standard theologically conservative form of Protestantism so it was at least a fair assumption that she would not have been hitting on my friend if she'd thought he was trans.

So, you have assumed (but did not confirm?) that your friend mistook him for a male?

But your own testimony works against you: your trans friend was so successful at passing that your Christian woman friend thought he was, in fact, male, and actually hit on them with that understanding, and that, had she known this person was female, would not have done so?

That very clearly indicates to me your friend does not consider trans men, 'men'.

This already begs the question: why are 'man', 'woman', 'she', etc 'gender' words? What makes them gender words and not sex words? I have not seen, in any medium, common usage of the term 'gender' to apply to humans before the 1960s. 'Man' and 'woman' are sex terms that have 'human' and 'maturity' as part of their definition. 'He' and 'she' are gender words for nouns (in languages where gendered nouns are a thing), but they were always words to describe sex for humans and other animals.

I mean, so what? This isn't hard to work out on one's own. Anglophone societies didn't make a distinction between one's sex and the social role one was expected to fulfill based on sex,

Well - they did - the concept of 'sex-role' exists.

but then it turned out that one's ability to wear pants, among other such gender segregated stupidia,

You mean: sex-segregated.

wasn't hindered by the lack of a penis or the presence of a vagina, so now we need some way of distinguishing between the actual literal physical differences and the random BS society arbitrarily assigned according to those. Let me be clear: The vast majority of, and possibly all, gender-based differences in our culture are, in my eyes, not things that should be determined by dangly parts and therefore, in my eyes, it's stupid to be emotionally attached to segregating such things based on dangly parts.

That's all well and fine, but you are still begging the question. I am a homosexual man, and I am homosexual because I am an adult human male attracted to other adult human males. Gender plays no part in my sexual orientation. Zero.

The fact that some of my ancestors were too thoroughly plumbing the depths of their own intestinal cavities to realize that it's ok for skirt-like garments to clad non-Scottish penises as well as Scottish ones does not create some moral profundity to their inability to distinguish between gender and sex. I mean, certain of the ancients made no category distinction between the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; are we supposed to ignore, now that we can actually go to those places, that they're wildly and radically different things and not just lights going around the sky just because their opinion is older? I am being somewhat flippant here because I am rather tired of this thoroughly debunked notion that we should do things the same way people in the past did them because those past people did them that way.

I did not suggest we should do things the way our ancestors did just because they did them that way.

I am suggesting that sex and gender are different, and you have to make the case that gender should supplant sex where you want gender to supplant sex.

And what's more, you are correct to note that "he" and "she" refer to grammatical gender in languages with grammatical gender. What you should learn now is that the fact that we have "he," "she," and "it" in English means that, in fact, English has grammatical gender too.

Yes, I understand that. That's why some countries are 'she' and some are 'he', and sea-going vessels are 'she', and so on.

That's right, all our nouns are gendered. All of them. It's just that the vast majority - BUT NOT ALL - of our inanimate nouns are neuter gender. Furthermore, it is thoroughly acceptable to use the neuter pronoun with babies and with animals, even animals whose gender we can determine easily (e.g. "I saw a buck in my yard, but it ran away when it say me" is a perfectly grammatical sentence in English). The word "ship" and words for countries are, at least in prestige varieties of English, gendered feminine, and yet I've yet to see a single ship's blueprint with the ship's vagina labeled.

Sure: because sex and gender are different. Do you imagine you are imparting some knowledge I did not already possess?

These are not patterns you would find if pronoun choice were conditioned based on sex, so all anti-trans arguments based on pronouns need to go pound sand already.

False. Nouns in general don't have a sex but they have a gender. Humans have a sex and some humans have a gender, but noun usage in humans has always been sexed.

Though you are also silent on the demands of neopronouns--of which there is a vast array. Are the neopronouns also all legitimate, and we have 'zero' reasons to not use them?

Now, this comment here is literally the reason I bothered responding to anything you wrote at all because I have some things to say about neopronouns. I am not, in principle, against neopronouns. If someone can make a neopronoun that can catch on really easily, great! I'll jump right on board! I am, however, against neopronouns made by people who have no idea how pronouns work in speech. Pronouns are very frequently used bits of language, so they need to be phonologically simple and have obvious reduced forms (that's forms pronounced with unstressed vowels) that don't end up sounding like other pronouns. The neopronouns I've run into in my time here on Earth fail spectacularly at those tasks. For instance, some people have proposed "hir" as an object form of a new pronoun, but there's just no way to reduce that without making it sound exactly like "her"! Like literally, what was even the point of coining a gender neutral pronoun if it's just going to end up sounding exactly like a gendered one that already exists?! Or are we supposed to pronounce it as /hɪr/, with full stress, every time we say it? "Zir" is a little better, but spelling-wise it doesn't pattern well with the other pronouns (a problem it shares with "hir"), and something just feels unnatural about having a /z/ in there.

Well, I agree, but you haven't even touched the sides of proposed neopronouns. So, using your argument that we should respect pronouns, how do we determine how to (and if) we ought respect neopronouns?

(I am talking about neopronouns like 'bug', 'demonself', etc).

Having said that, I'm not positive neopronouns are actually solving an unsolved problem. "They" has a very long history of being used as a gender neutral pronoun for individual humans and is still used as such today, and using it for non-binary individuals just isn't a huge leap for me. It seems to me that the primary impetus for making a separate gender neutral pronoun from singular "they" is an erroneous belief that there's something bad about using singular "they", and there is very little I hate more than the stupid forms of grammatical prescriptivism we've inherited from folks with a hardcore Latin fetish. But even so, if someone can come up with a neopronoun that isn't pretty objectively a bad fit for English phonotactics, then I'm totally on board.

I use they often in certain context to refer to somebody of unknown gender. I don't have a particular problem with it, or indeed any polite fictions. But what about 'demonself'? Please note I am not making any of these neopronouns up.

But of course, you weren't really asking if neopronouns were made by people with a grasp on how people actually use pronouns on a phonological level. You're trying to see if I consider it bigotry not to use them. My answer is: If you are not using them because you dislike the concept of non-binary people

I don't 'dislike to concept' of non-binary people. "Non-binary" is a gender identity and is a thought in a person's head. That you have certain thoughts in your head doesn't bother me.

or the idea of not using a person's preferred pronouns, then that's a shitty reason to avoid them. Even if I run into someone who wants me to use "hir" for hir, even though that pronoun is objectively poorly designed for its intended function, I will make a good faith effort to use it.

That's good for you--but do you think I ought be compelled to use them? Or that I ought use them?

Trans activists demand we supplant sex for gender in nearly every conceivable situation. And the transformation of language is a step in that process: if you are treating trans women as women for language purposes, then they must also be women for all purposes.

Sounds fine to me. Language is transforming anyway, we might as well change it in a way that makes it suck less for trans folks too.

It sounds ludicrous and awful to me. That women play in sports against other females does not mean they ought play against other males who utter 'I identify as a woman'.

 

[prideandfall]

But this doesn't explain why there are trans women who don't mind having a penis and trans men who don't mind having a vagina. There are trans people like you say who hate their bodies and wish the body was different, but there are some who are fine with their genitals. Why is this so?

as i said earlier: being 'trans' is not a monolithic ideology, all trans people don't feel the same way about the issue.

so you've got some people who just want to act like they're another gender but not surgically alter their bodies, and you have some people who want to basically cosplay being another sex and will go to any lengths for the sake of their outfit, and many levels in between.

However, the phrases "sex and gender are different" and "my sex and gender are the same" is still a contradiction that needs to be resolved.

there are 2 distinct possibilities here:
1. you properly understand the terms defined in the sentence but the logic of the sentence is irrational.
2. you do not properly understand the terms defined in the sentence and thus you are unable to understand the logic.

in these types of discussions it's generally accepted that 'sex' refers to your physical anatomy, and 'gender' refers to the cultural norms attached to that sex.
thus another way to look at it, using terms that are similar but that i think highlight the difference:
"i am male but feel feminine" would be akin to "my sex and gender are different" - we're talking about the difference in one's physical traits and one's perception of their identity within the cultural sphere.

It just feels strange to say, "My gender matches my sex" as if there's suposed to a "right way" for it to be.

well, for all intents and purposes there IS a 'right way' that it's supposed to be - though that statement is a bit problematic since 'right' and 'supposed' sort of imply some kind of planned system.
your right arm is supposed to be on the right side of your body. your gender matching your sex is the way you're supposed to be.
if you grew an arm on the left side of your torso where the hand was reversed and the elbow went the other way and the shoulder socket went backwards, you could say you have a right arm on your left side without it being an inherent contradiction to the concept of arms or sides.

But as I said before, trans people say there is no right way to be a man or woman.

and those people are wrong, but insist on saying that because they can't mentally cope with the idea of their self expression *not* being everyone else's obligation to satisfy.

But by using the label "transgender" it implies that there is a right way to be a man or a woman. If sex and gender are different, there should be no way it should even be possible to utter the phrase "my sex and gender are the same."

but arms and sides are different, and you could have a correct arm on the wrong side (in theory) - it's basically the same principle.

But, why are these organs supposed to be a man's or woman's organ if sex and gender are different?

because sex is your physical reality and gender is the expectation for how your physical reality is supposed to dictate your personality.
they're not the same thing, but they also never have been.

Or to put it simpler which I just thought of: A baby is a born with a penis. What gender is supposed to "match" this penis organ? How and why do you know?

well "supposed to" in this case is a tricky one, because nothing created out of human social constructs is "supposed" to be, it just is.
a baby born with a penis will typically match the 'man' gender - if a thing typically happens, does that elevate the process to the level of 'supposed to'?
i guess it's kind of like how your car is *supposed* to start when you turn the key, but there's a ton of things that can happen to that process that makes it so that is not the end result of turning the key.
does that mean that cars aren't supposed to start when you turn the key?

 

[Melange_Thief]

Without getting too deep into specifics, there was a straight, very Christian woman in our group who had pretty different ways of treating men and women, and belonged to a very conservative variety of the religion. She, uh, quite distinctly treated my friend as a man rather than as a woman. We didn't specifically discuss LGBT issues with her, admittedly, but other matters we discussed made it clear that she followed a fairly standard theologically conservative form of Protestantism so it was at least a fair assumption that she would not have been hitting on my friend if she'd thought he was trans.

So, you have assumed (but did not confirm?) that your friend mistook him for a male?

But your own testimony works against you: your trans friend was so successful at passing that your Christian woman friend thought he was, in fact, male, and actually hit on them with that understanding, and that, had she known this person was female, would not have done so?

That very clearly indicates to me your friend does not consider trans men, 'men'.

She did not consider trans men to be men, yet she did consider an individual trans man to be a man. Almost as if, in her mind, being physiologically male isn't necessary for her to apply the term to someone if they fulfill other conditions. Almost as if the meaning of "man" is more complicated than simply being the right sex. Almost as if society didn't fucking collapse because of it.

wasn't hindered by the lack of a penis or the presence of a vagina, so now we need some way of distinguishing between the actual literal physical differences and the random BS society arbitrarily assigned according to those. Let me be clear: The vast majority of, and possibly all, gender-based differences in our culture are, in my eyes, not things that should be determined by dangly parts and therefore, in my eyes, it's stupid to be emotionally attached to segregating such things based on dangly parts.

That's all well and fine, but you are still begging the question. I am a homosexual man, and I am homosexual because I am an adult human male attracted to other adult human males. Gender plays no part in my sexual orientation. Zero.

Ok? From my perspective your statement here neither contradicts nor follows from what you quoted from my post, which is an indication to me that neither of us is really understanding what animates the other's concerns with regards to trans-related issues. This isn't criticism or snark, by the way, I just find it mildly interesting.

The fact that some of my ancestors were too thoroughly plumbing the depths of their own intestinal cavities to realize that it's ok for skirt-like garments to clad non-Scottish penises as well as Scottish ones does not create some moral profundity to their inability to distinguish between gender and sex. I mean, certain of the ancients made no category distinction between the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; are we supposed to ignore, now that we can actually go to those places, that they're wildly and radically different things and not just lights going around the sky just because their opinion is older? I am being somewhat flippant here because I am rather tired of this thoroughly debunked notion that we should do things the same way people in the past did them because those past people did them that way.

I did not suggest we should do things the way our ancestors did just because they did them that way.

I am suggesting that sex and gender are different, and you have to make the case that gender should supplant sex where you want gender to supplant sex.

You have yet to demonstrate that society should default to treating someone as the role society deems as assigned to a specific sex in cases where physical sex is irrelevant. And if that's not your position, then the amount of concern you have about trans folks is really, REALLY weird.

That's right, all our nouns are gendered. All of them. It's just that the vast majority - BUT NOT ALL - of our inanimate nouns are neuter gender. Furthermore, it is thoroughly acceptable to use the neuter pronoun with babies and with animals, even animals whose gender we can determine easily (e.g. "I saw a buck in my yard, but it ran away when it say me" is a perfectly grammatical sentence in English). The word "ship" and words for countries are, at least in prestige varieties of English, gendered feminine, and yet I've yet to see a single ship's blueprint with the ship's vagina labeled.

Sure: because sex and gender are different. Do you imagine you are imparting some knowledge I did not already possess?'

When you say things like:

Non. Pronouns are sexed, not gendered. You are begging the question.

and

False. Nouns in general don't have a sex but they have a gender. Humans have a sex and some humans have a gender, but noun usage in humans has always been sexed.

then you can't really blame me for thinking you didn't know that about how English pronouns work, can you?

Though you are also silent on the demands of neopronouns--of which there is a vast array. Are the neopronouns also all legitimate, and we have 'zero' reasons to not use them?

Now, this comment here is literally the reason I bothered responding to anything you wrote at all because I have some things to say about neopronouns. I am not, in principle, against neopronouns. If someone can make a neopronoun that can catch on really easily, great! I'll jump right on board! I am, however, against neopronouns made by people who have no idea how pronouns work in speech. Pronouns are very frequently used bits of language, so they need to be phonologically simple and have obvious reduced forms (that's forms pronounced with unstressed vowels) that don't end up sounding like other pronouns. The neopronouns I've run into in my time here on Earth fail spectacularly at those tasks. For instance, some people have proposed "hir" as an object form of a new pronoun, but there's just no way to reduce that without making it sound exactly like "her"! Like literally, what was even the point of coining a gender neutral pronoun if it's just going to end up sounding exactly like a gendered one that already exists?! Or are we supposed to pronounce it as /hɪr/, with full stress, every time we say it? "Zir" is a little better, but spelling-wise it doesn't pattern well with the other pronouns (a problem it shares with "hir"), and something just feels unnatural about having a /z/ in there.

Well, I agree, but you haven't even touched the sides of proposed neopronouns. So, using your argument that we should respect pronouns, how do we determine how to (and if) we ought respect neopronouns?

(I am talking about neopronouns like 'bug', 'demonself', etc).

Huh, I have to admit that those are even worse. Like I said, no one who's proposed neopronouns has done a single thing to make them actually work as pronouns (at least that I've seen). I think I see what they're trying to do, and there's definitely languages where pronouns work sort of like how the coiners of those neopronouns would like English pronouns to work, but A. I don't think anyone coining the neopronouns you cited even understands that they're trying to change how an entire word class works in English, which means they're unlikely to achieve it, and B. I'm frankly unaware of any situation wherein a word class in a language has changed from a very strict closed class to a very open class in the lifetime of a native speaker. Suffice to say, I am not sanguine that those neopronouns will catch on.

Having said that, I'm not positive neopronouns are actually solving an unsolved problem. "They" has a very long history of being used as a gender neutral pronoun for individual humans and is still used as such today, and using it for non-binary individuals just isn't a huge leap for me. It seems to me that the primary impetus for making a separate gender neutral pronoun from singular "they" is an erroneous belief that there's something bad about using singular "they", and there is very little I hate more than the stupid forms of grammatical prescriptivism we've inherited from folks with a hardcore Latin fetish. But even so, if someone can come up with a neopronoun that isn't pretty objectively a bad fit for English phonotactics, then I'm totally on board.

I use they often in certain context to refer to somebody of unknown gender. I don't have a particular problem with it, or indeed any polite fictions. But what about 'demonself'? Please note I am not making any of these neopronouns up.

It's telling that the person coining "demonself" can only distinguish the "-self" form from any of the other forms, which isn't exactly a hallmark of being an English pronoun. I don't recommend using it as the pronoun for any NB characters you write in a work of fiction, but there's still the principle of not-being-an-asshole should you run into someone who asks you to use that one.

But of course, you weren't really asking if neopronouns were made by people with a grasp on how people actually use pronouns on a phonological level. You're trying to see if I consider it bigotry not to use them. My answer is: If you are not using them because you dislike the concept of non-binary people

I don't 'dislike to concept' of non-binary people. "Non-binary" is a gender identity and is a thought in a person's head. That you have certain thoughts in your head doesn't bother me.

Then the "if" clause doesn't apply to you.

or the idea of not using a person's preferred pronouns, then that's a shitty reason to avoid them. Even if I run into someone who wants me to use "hir" for hir, even though that pronoun is objectively poorly designed for its intended function, I will make a good faith effort to use it.

That's good for you--but do you think I ought be compelled to use them? Or that I ought use them?

I mean, yeah, if they want you to use them it's literally no skin off your nose to use them, so you ought to use them in an abstract moral sense. Compelled to use them? In a legal sense, no, but you also don't deserve legal protections from social or employment consequences should your hypothetical commitment to causing pronoun-based anguish somehow backfire on you.

Trans activists demand we supplant sex for gender in nearly every conceivable situation. And the transformation of language is a step in that process: if you are treating trans women as women for language purposes, then they must also be women for all purposes.

Sounds fine to me. Language is transforming anyway, we might as well change it in a way that makes it suck less for trans folks too.

It sounds ludicrous and awful to me. That women play in sports against other females does not mean they ought play against other males who utter 'I identify as a woman'.

I'll agree that specifically in the realm of sports, it's at least a little more complicated than "let people play wherever they want," but to me that means something like "let's sit down with the data and find a good faith system that lets trans women can play women's sports". But everything I have ever seen out of the trans-skeptic community makes me believe that literally no one raising "concerns" about this topic (or any other trans-related topic) actually cares about actual, living and breathing trans folks who actually experience the consequences of trans-related policies more than their weird bugaboos about gender, sex, and the concept of transgenderism, so I'ma go ahead and stick with reflexively supporting the trans community on this one instead of trying to engage in substansive conversation on the topic.

 

[Generation55]

I'll agree that specifically in the realm of sports, it's at least a little more complicated than "let people play wherever they want," but to me that means something like "let's sit down with the data and find a good faith system that lets trans women can play women's sports". But everything I have ever seen out of the trans-skeptic community makes me believe that literally no one raising "concerns" about this topic (or any other trans-related topic) actually cares about actual, living and breathing trans folks who actually experience the consequences of trans-related policies more than their weird bugaboos about gender, sex, and the concept of transgenderism, so I'ma go ahead and stick with reflexively supporting the trans community on this one instead of trying to engage in substansive conversation on the topic.

What you just said there is a big part of why this discussion is very important. It doesn't feel right on a gut level to allow trans women to compete with cisgender women. In the Guinness Book of World Records in 2010, there was a transgender man named Thomas Beatie who became known as "The Pregnant Man" and went into the records books......and this is a real quote.....as ""World's First Married Man to Give Birth." Does this sound like a worthy headline? I can't imagine you guys actually agreeing with this quote as the same thing as a man actually giving birth. This is why we need definitions of the words. Do you guys agree with the Guinness Book of World Records here?

For example, if a trans women were to impregnate a trans man, I can write the headline, "Woman impregnates man." Is it really possible you guys can read this with a straight face and agree with it? This is why this subject is so important. It makes it seem like the words "man" and "woman" are losing all meaning. They can mean everything and nothing at the same time.

Can any of you guys try to explain this?

 

[Metaphor]

Without getting too deep into specifics, there was a straight, very Christian woman in our group who had pretty different ways of treating men and women, and belonged to a very conservative variety of the religion. She, uh, quite distinctly treated my friend as a man rather than as a woman. We didn't specifically discuss LGBT issues with her, admittedly, but other matters we discussed made it clear that she followed a fairly standard theologically conservative form of Protestantism so it was at least a fair assumption that she would not have been hitting on my friend if she'd thought he was trans.

So, you have assumed (but did not confirm?) that your friend mistook him for a male?

But your own testimony works against you: your trans friend was so successful at passing that your Christian woman friend thought he was, in fact, male, and actually hit on them with that understanding, and that, had she known this person was female, would not have done so?

That very clearly indicates to me your friend does not consider trans men, 'men'.

She did not consider trans men to be men, yet she did consider an individual trans man to be a man. Almost as if, in her mind, being physiologically male isn't necessary for her to apply the term to someone if they fulfill other conditions. Almost as if the meaning of "man" is more complicated than simply being the right sex. Almost as if society didn't fucking collapse because of it.

Except no, she did not consider that person to be a man. She mistook him for a man, and when she discovered he was not one, (when she found out your friend was female), she lost all interest in hitting on them.

If indeed she really considered your trans friend a man, finding out they were trans ought have made no difference to her.

wasn't hindered by the lack of a penis or the presence of a vagina, so now we need some way of distinguishing between the actual literal physical differences and the random BS society arbitrarily assigned according to those. Let me be clear: The vast majority of, and possibly all, gender-based differences in our culture are, in my eyes, not things that should be determined by dangly parts and therefore, in my eyes, it's stupid to be emotionally attached to segregating such things based on dangly parts.

That's all well and fine, but you are still begging the question. I am a homosexual man, and I am homosexual because I am an adult human male attracted to other adult human males. Gender plays no part in my sexual orientation. Zero.

Ok? From my perspective your statement here neither contradicts nor follows from what you quoted from my post, which is an indication to me that neither of us is really understanding what animates the other's concerns with regards to trans-related issues. This isn't criticism or snark, by the way, I just find it mildly interesting.

I segregate the people I will have sex with and the ones I will not, based on their 'dangly parts'. (Based on their primary and secondary sexual characteristics, actually, but 'dangly parts' usually correlates well enough). Are you suggesting that instead I should abandon my sexual orientation and base it on being oriented to a particular gender?

The fact that some of my ancestors were too thoroughly plumbing the depths of their own intestinal cavities to realize that it's ok for skirt-like garments to clad non-Scottish penises as well as Scottish ones does not create some moral profundity to their inability to distinguish between gender and sex. I mean, certain of the ancients made no category distinction between the Sun, the Moon, and the planets; are we supposed to ignore, now that we can actually go to those places, that they're wildly and radically different things and not just lights going around the sky just because their opinion is older? I am being somewhat flippant here because I am rather tired of this thoroughly debunked notion that we should do things the same way people in the past did them because those past people did them that way.

I did not suggest we should do things the way our ancestors did just because they did them that way.

I am suggesting that sex and gender are different, and you have to make the case that gender should supplant sex where you want gender to supplant sex.

You have yet to demonstrate that society should default to treating someone as the role society deems as assigned to a specific sex in cases where physical sex is irrelevant. And if that's not your position, then the amount of concern you have about trans folks is really, REALLY weird.

Society already does things to people according to their sex. Society segregates sports by sex, and intimate spaces. I also personally choose people I want to fuck based on their sex. That is, I certainly don't want to fuck every man on the planet, but I only want to fuck men. And men are adult human males.

Now: if instead you will allow my sexual preference but want me to say "I want to fuck only adult human males", well, I find that odd that I would have to change my language to suit some females who want to call themselves men.

That's right, all our nouns are gendered. All of them. It's just that the vast majority - BUT NOT ALL - of our inanimate nouns are neuter gender. Furthermore, it is thoroughly acceptable to use the neuter pronoun with babies and with animals, even animals whose gender we can determine easily (e.g. "I saw a buck in my yard, but it ran away when it say me" is a perfectly grammatical sentence in English). The word "ship" and words for countries are, at least in prestige varieties of English, gendered feminine, and yet I've yet to see a single ship's blueprint with the ship's vagina labeled.

Sure: because sex and gender are different. Do you imagine you are imparting some knowledge I did not already possess?'

When you say things like:

Non. Pronouns are sexed, not gendered. You are begging the question.

and

False. Nouns in general don't have a sex but they have a gender. Humans have a sex and some humans have a gender, but noun usage in humans has always been sexed.

then you can't really blame me for thinking you didn't know that about how English pronouns work, can you?

I can certainly blame you. Pronouns, like he, him, and it, refer to sex in animals, and to gender in other things that don't have a sex.

Though you are also silent on the demands of neopronouns--of which there is a vast array. Are the neopronouns also all legitimate, and we have 'zero' reasons to not use them?

Now, this comment here is literally the reason I bothered responding to anything you wrote at all because I have some things to say about neopronouns. I am not, in principle, against neopronouns. If someone can make a neopronoun that can catch on really easily, great! I'll jump right on board! I am, however, against neopronouns made by people who have no idea how pronouns work in speech. Pronouns are very frequently used bits of language, so they need to be phonologically simple and have obvious reduced forms (that's forms pronounced with unstressed vowels) that don't end up sounding like other pronouns. The neopronouns I've run into in my time here on Earth fail spectacularly at those tasks. For instance, some people have proposed "hir" as an object form of a new pronoun, but there's just no way to reduce that without making it sound exactly like "her"! Like literally, what was even the point of coining a gender neutral pronoun if it's just going to end up sounding exactly like a gendered one that already exists?! Or are we supposed to pronounce it as /hɪr/, with full stress, every time we say it? "Zir" is a little better, but spelling-wise it doesn't pattern well with the other pronouns (a problem it shares with "hir"), and something just feels unnatural about having a /z/ in there.

Well, I agree, but you haven't even touched the sides of proposed neopronouns. So, using your argument that we should respect pronouns, how do we determine how to (and if) we ought respect neopronouns?

(I am talking about neopronouns like 'bug', 'demonself', etc).

Huh, I have to admit that those are even worse. Like I said, no one who's proposed neopronouns has done a single thing to make them actually work as pronouns (at least that I've seen). I think I see what they're trying to do, and there's definitely languages where pronouns work sort of like how the coiners of those neopronouns would like English pronouns to work, but A. I don't think anyone coining the neopronouns you cited even understands that they're trying to change how an entire word class works in English, which means they're unlikely to achieve it, and B. I'm frankly unaware of any situation wherein a word class in a language has changed from a very strict closed class to a very open class in the lifetime of a native speaker. Suffice to say, I am not sanguine that those neopronouns will catch on.

I don't believe they will catch on either, but that isn't my point. You stated earlier that we should 'respect' the pronouns that trans people want us to use for them, but you seem unaware of the myriad pronouns they are proposing we 'respect'.

Having said that, I'm not positive neopronouns are actually solving an unsolved problem. "They" has a very long history of being used as a gender neutral pronoun for individual humans and is still used as such today, and using it for non-binary individuals just isn't a huge leap for me. It seems to me that the primary impetus for making a separate gender neutral pronoun from singular "they" is an erroneous belief that there's something bad about using singular "they", and there is very little I hate more than the stupid forms of grammatical prescriptivism we've inherited from folks with a hardcore Latin fetish. But even so, if someone can come up with a neopronoun that isn't pretty objectively a bad fit for English phonotactics, then I'm totally on board.

I use they often in certain context to refer to somebody of unknown gender. I don't have a particular problem with it, or indeed any polite fictions. But what about 'demonself'? Please note I am not making any of these neopronouns up.

It's telling that the person coining "demonself" can only distinguish the "-self" form from any of the other forms, which isn't exactly a hallmark of being an English pronoun. I don't recommend using it as the pronoun for any NB characters you write in a work of fiction, but there's still the principle of not-being-an-asshole should you run into someone who asks you to use that one.

If I knew this person personally, I would not use their pronouns. These pronouns I have come across from various sources online. The person wanting to use 'demon' pronouns was an obvious adult human female, and I would use those pronouns accordingly.

But of course, you weren't really asking if neopronouns were made by people with a grasp on how people actually use pronouns on a phonological level. You're trying to see if I consider it bigotry not to use them. My answer is: If you are not using them because you dislike the concept of non-binary people

I don't 'dislike to concept' of non-binary people. "Non-binary" is a gender identity and is a thought in a person's head. That you have certain thoughts in your head doesn't bother me.

Then the "if" clause doesn't apply to you.

or the idea of not using a person's preferred pronouns, then that's a shitty reason to avoid them. Even if I run into someone who wants me to use "hir" for hir, even though that pronoun is objectively poorly designed for its intended function, I will make a good faith effort to use it.

That's good for you--but do you think I ought be compelled to use them? Or that I ought use them?

I mean, yeah, if they want you to use them it's literally no skin off your nose to use them,

Huh? Of course it is. Of course it is. To use female-sexed pronouns for a person who is obviously male is engaging in fiction. Even if you think I ought to do it, you cannot discount to zero the cognitive effort and reformation required of someone to do it.

so you ought to use them in an abstract moral sense. Compelled to use them? In a legal sense, no, but you also don't deserve legal protections from social or employment consequences should your hypothetical commitment to causing pronoun-based anguish somehow backfire on you.

So, if somebody in my workplace wants me to use 'demon' pronouns, I ought use them, or face the consequences?

Trans activists demand we supplant sex for gender in nearly every conceivable situation. And the transformation of language is a step in that process: if you are treating trans women as women for language purposes, then they must also be women for all purposes.

Sounds fine to me. Language is transforming anyway, we might as well change it in a way that makes it suck less for trans folks too.

It sounds ludicrous and awful to me. That women play in sports against other females does not mean they ought play against other males who utter 'I identify as a woman'.

I'll agree that specifically in the realm of sports, it's at least a little more complicated than "let people play wherever they want," but to me that means something like "let's sit down with the data and find a good faith system that lets trans women can play women's sports".

Why does it mean that? You are begging the question. Why should males be able to play sex-segregated sports against females, no matter what the males utter?

But everything I have ever seen out of the trans-skeptic community makes me believe that literally no one raising "concerns" about this topic (or any other trans-related topic) actually cares about actual, living and breathing trans folks who actually experience the consequences of trans-related policies more than their weird bugaboos about gender, sex, and the concept of transgenderism, so I'ma go ahead and stick with reflexively supporting the trans community on this one instead of trying to engage in substansive conversation on the topic.

Well, I will stick with adult human females who do not want to have males in their sports or intimate spaces. But my support isn't 'reflexive'--I've thought about these issues for a long time.

 

[Politesse]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

Well, that's a load of nonsense. That's not information you're even privy to when you're just out on the street looking for someone to date. We're highly dependent on how someone presents themselves - a component of their gender - in feeling attraction to them. Any trans woman can tell you that being hit on by straight men is a regular occurrence in their lives whether or not it is wanted.

 

[Trausti]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

Well, that's a load of nonsense. That's not information you're even privy to when you're just out on the street looking for someone to date. We're highly dependent on how someone presents themselves - a component of their gender - in feeling attraction to them. Any trans woman can tell you that being hit on by straight men is a regular occurrence in their lives whether or not it is wanted.

Yeah, no. A man in a dress is a man in a dress.

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

Hi I am new here but I have been reading for about a month. I hope this is the right forum for this because it has become a political issue. If it's the wrong forum, I apologize.

With that said, I am looking to see if any of you guys can help me understand sex and gender and transgender people because it has been driving me nuts when I think about it. I want to say first off that I have no problem with trans people. If someone wants to dress or act a certain way, that is fine by me. My issue is with the gender/sex subject.

I have been reading the subject and I hear, "Sex and gender are different. They have nothing to do with each other." This confuses me because people say around 99% of people are "cisgender", which means your gender and sex match. But how can gender and sex "match" if they have nothing to do with each other? Saying they match is implying that sex and gender are the same thing and there is a right way and a wrong way, yet people insist on saying they have nothing to do with each other. For example, if someone is a born male and identifies as a man, people say they are cisgender because their sex and gender match. This implies there is a right way to be male and a right way to be female. Otherwise, how can you say they match?

Transgender people are "people whose gender identity differs from their birth sex." But if sex and gender have nothing to do with each other, how can someone state that "my gender differs from my birth sex?" This implies that a person's gender should be the same as their birth sex. But, this is in direct contradiction to the fact that people say, "sex and gender are different and have nothing to do with each other." But for 99% of people, sex and gender are the same. For example, when people find out the sex of their baby, they say, "it's a boy" or "it's a girl." But how can they say this when they only know the baby's sex and not their gender? We are told that only the person themselves can decide what gender they are. So this implies parents should say, "I found out my baby will be born with a penis. But, I have no idea if it will be a boy or girl because they haven't decided their gender yet." Nobody says this. They all say "boy" or "girl" and give the baby "he" and "she" pronouns before they are even born. This implies sex and gender are the same thing. So if 99% of people are comfortable with their gender and sex being the same thing, how can people still claim gender and sex have nothing to do with each other?

So when trans women say, "I was assigned male at birth but I now identify as a woman," this implies that people who are assigned male at birth are supposed to identify as a man. But, how can this be if sex and gender have nothing to do with each other? If someone is assigned male at birth and identifies as a woman, how can this even be considered "transgender" if sex and gender are supposed to have nothing to do with each other? One can just as easily say, "I was born male and I identify as a man and I am transgender becuase sex and gender have nothing to do with each other. Being a man doesn't have anything to do with my penis." The term "transgender" implies that gender and sex should match each other. But if they match this implies gender and sex are the same thing despite the fact people say they are completely different.

Can you guys see the point I am trying to make here? I am trying to explain it as best as I can. Let me summarize: On one hand, people say gender and sex are completely different and have nothing to do with each other. Yet, 99% of people are "cisgender," which means that your gender and sex are the same thing. Can anyone solve this contradiction? I've been trying to for a while and I can't think of a good answer. This is why I'm asking you guys. As I said, I have no problem with trans people. I just feel like there is a big contradiction here with these definitions. I hope you guys can answer these questions for me. I've been driving myself nuts thinking about this.

It has something to do with the fractional anisotropy of my right inferior occipito-frontal fasciculus, which is a gray matter tract that passes backward from my frontal lobe along the lateral border caudate nucleus and radiates in a fan-like manner, on the corona radiata, into the temporal and occipital lobes lateral to the posterior and inferior cornua. Effectively, a certain set of signals, between my frontal and occipital lobe, are drawn into a "tighter beam" than those of a cis-male.

This is most likely true specifically because I am attracted to the male sex. Transgender women that are bisexual or homosexual, with respect to their gender identity, exist, but the causation has been suspected to be different in a large proportion of cases. I do not pretend to understand that other proposed causation. I think that it has something to do with the putamen and some part of the hypothalamus.

Anyhow, while that white matter tract, alone, is only partly cross-gender, it is also true that gay men and androsexual trans-women are frequently found to have ultra-cross-sex development in certain other parts of their brains. Interestingly enough, some of us can actually be more female than female, in certain respects. This might be selection bias, though. I suspect that it takes a stronger neurological bias for an assigned male at birth (AMAB) to admit to being attracted to men than it takes for the average cis-woman to stay content with her socially expected role in society.

Exceptions to all of this most likely do exist, but I doubt that I am one of them.

 

[Politesse]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

Well, that's a load of nonsense. That's not information you're even privy to when you're just out on the street looking for someone to date. We're highly dependent on how someone presents themselves - a component of their gender - in feeling attraction to them. Any trans woman can tell you that being hit on by straight men is a regular occurrence in their lives whether or not it is wanted.

Yeah, no. A man in a dress is a man in a dress.

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences.

Attraction isn't the same thing as dating.

Even the most assholish of straight guys don't actually treat trans women exactly as though they were men. Especially if they don't know that they are trans women.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

Well, that's a load of nonsense. That's not information you're even privy to when you're just out on the street looking for someone to date. We're highly dependent on how someone presents themselves - a component of their gender - in feeling attraction to them. Any trans woman can tell you that being hit on by straight men is a regular occurrence in their lives whether or not it is wanted.

Yeah, no. A man in a dress is a man in a dress.

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences.

Attraction isn't the same thing as dating.

Even the most assholish of straight guys don't actually treat trans women exactly as though they were men. Especially if they don't know that they are trans women.

The only time that those types of men treat me like a man are when I tell them I enjoy being treated like a woman.

Allow me to amend that. I do not really enjoy being treated in the way that those types of men treat a woman.

I enjoy being treated in the way that an interesting, worldly, charming, endlessly loquacious, highly educated college professor treats a woman, especially if they are ticklish and enjoy watching intellectually stimulating cartoons on Netflix (you know, the ones that are like acid trips) while sipping on a good Rioja Tempranillo. Bonus points if they bring shrooms, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

[Politesse]

Allow me to amend that. I do not really enjoy being treated in the way that those types of men treat a woman.

I enjoy being treated in the way that an interesting, worldly, charming, endlessly loquacious, highly educated college professor treats a woman, especially if they are ticklish and enjoy watching intellectually stimulating cartoons on Netflix (you know, the ones that are like acid trips) while sipping on a good Rioja Tempranillo. Bonus points if they bring shrooms, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Yeah. I kind of like guys, but I've never quite understood what straight women see in them. (given how the stupid "war of the sexes" has painted the distinction and set expectations of interaction...)

 

[SigmatheZeta]

Allow me to amend that. I do not really enjoy being treated in the way that those types of men treat a woman.

I enjoy being treated in the way that an interesting, worldly, charming, endlessly loquacious, highly educated college professor treats a woman, especially if they are ticklish and enjoy watching intellectually stimulating cartoons on Netflix (you know, the ones that are like acid trips) while sipping on a good Rioja Tempranillo. Bonus points if they bring shrooms, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Yeah. I kind of like guys, but I've never quite understood what straight women see in them.

Blame it on Disney. This is strongly related to why women can have such unbelievably poor taste in men.

 

[Trausti]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

Well, that's a load of nonsense. That's not information you're even privy to when you're just out on the street looking for someone to date. We're highly dependent on how someone presents themselves - a component of their gender - in feeling attraction to them. Any trans woman can tell you that being hit on by straight men is a regular occurrence in their lives whether or not it is wanted.

Yeah, no. A man in a dress is a man in a dress.

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences.

Attraction isn't the same thing as dating.

Even the most assholish of straight guys don't actually treat trans women exactly as though they were men. Especially if they don't know that they are trans women.

They’re blind?

 

[SigmatheZeta]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

Well, that's a load of nonsense. That's not information you're even privy to when you're just out on the street looking for someone to date. We're highly dependent on how someone presents themselves - a component of their gender - in feeling attraction to them. Any trans woman can tell you that being hit on by straight men is a regular occurrence in their lives whether or not it is wanted.

Yeah, no. A man in a dress is a man in a dress.

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences.

Attraction isn't the same thing as dating.

Even the most assholish of straight guys don't actually treat trans women exactly as though they were men. Especially if they don't know that they are trans women.

They’re blind?

Retrospectively, I think that @Politesse was referring to those trans-women that choose to go stealth. You would not believe how effective some cunning make-up tricks are at hiding someone's assigned sex at birth, especially years after having started hormone-replacement therapy.

I am non-stealth, myself, so @Politesse's intended meaning flew a bit over my head, momentarily.

 

[Generation55]

Hi I am new here but I have been reading for about a month. I hope this is the right forum for this because it has become a political issue. If it's the wrong forum, I apologize.

With that said, I am looking to see if any of you guys can help me understand sex and gender and transgender people because it has been driving me nuts when I think about it. I want to say first off that I have no problem with trans people. If someone wants to dress or act a certain way, that is fine by me. My issue is with the gender/sex subject.

I have been reading the subject and I hear, "Sex and gender are different. They have nothing to do with each other." This confuses me because people say around 99% of people are "cisgender", which means your gender and sex match. But how can gender and sex "match" if they have nothing to do with each other? Saying they match is implying that sex and gender are the same thing and there is a right way and a wrong way, yet people insist on saying they have nothing to do with each other. For example, if someone is a born male and identifies as a man, people say they are cisgender because their sex and gender match. This implies there is a right way to be male and a right way to be female. Otherwise, how can you say they match?

Transgender people are "people whose gender identity differs from their birth sex." But if sex and gender have nothing to do with each other, how can someone state that "my gender differs from my birth sex?" This implies that a person's gender should be the same as their birth sex. But, this is in direct contradiction to the fact that people say, "sex and gender are different and have nothing to do with each other." But for 99% of people, sex and gender are the same. For example, when people find out the sex of their baby, they say, "it's a boy" or "it's a girl." But how can they say this when they only know the baby's sex and not their gender? We are told that only the person themselves can decide what gender they are. So this implies parents should say, "I found out my baby will be born with a penis. But, I have no idea if it will be a boy or girl because they haven't decided their gender yet." Nobody says this. They all say "boy" or "girl" and give the baby "he" and "she" pronouns before they are even born. This implies sex and gender are the same thing. So if 99% of people are comfortable with their gender and sex being the same thing, how can people still claim gender and sex have nothing to do with each other?

So when trans women say, "I was assigned male at birth but I now identify as a woman," this implies that people who are assigned male at birth are supposed to identify as a man. But, how can this be if sex and gender have nothing to do with each other? If someone is assigned male at birth and identifies as a woman, how can this even be considered "transgender" if sex and gender are supposed to have nothing to do with each other? One can just as easily say, "I was born male and I identify as a man and I am transgender becuase sex and gender have nothing to do with each other. Being a man doesn't have anything to do with my penis." The term "transgender" implies that gender and sex should match each other. But if they match this implies gender and sex are the same thing despite the fact people say they are completely different.

Can you guys see the point I am trying to make here? I am trying to explain it as best as I can. Let me summarize: On one hand, people say gender and sex are completely different and have nothing to do with each other. Yet, 99% of people are "cisgender," which means that your gender and sex are the same thing. Can anyone solve this contradiction? I've been trying to for a while and I can't think of a good answer. This is why I'm asking you guys. As I said, I have no problem with trans people. I just feel like there is a big contradiction here with these definitions. I hope you guys can answer these questions for me. I've been driving myself nuts thinking about this.

It has something to do with the fractional anisotropy of my right inferior occipito-frontal fasciculus, which is a gray matter tract that passes backward from my frontal lobe along the lateral border caudate nucleus and radiates in a fan-like manner, on the corona radiata, into the temporal and occipital lobes lateral to the posterior and inferior cornua. Effectively, a certain set of signals, between my frontal and occipital lobe, are drawn into a "tighter beam" than those of a cis-male.

This is most likely true specifically because I am attracted to the male sex. Transgender women that are bisexual or homosexual, with respect to their gender identity, exist, but the causation has been suspected to be different in a large proportion of cases. I do not pretend to understand that other proposed causation. I think that it has something to do with the putamen and some part of the hypothalamus.

Anyhow, while that white matter tract, alone, is only partly cross-gender, it is also true that gay men and androsexual trans-women are frequently found to have ultra-cross-sex development in certain other parts of their brains. Interestingly enough, some of us can actually be more female than female, in certain respects. This might be selection bias, though. I suspect that it takes a stronger neurological bias for an assigned male at birth (AMAB) to admit to being attracted to men than it takes for the average cis-woman to stay content with her socially expected role in society.

Exceptions to all of this most likely do exist, but I doubt that I am one of them.

Thank you for replying. It is interesting you mention this stuff about the brain. I have been doing some reading and it says there are differences in transgender brains and male and female brains. However, transgender brains are still male or female, right? So why call it a transgender brain? I also read some articles about how there are no differences between brains and it's a sexist myth. How do I know which is true? Also, why do transgender people claim they are transitioning from male to female or female to male? I thought it was only about gender and you can't change your sex? This is all so confusing to me.

I also would like a response to post #58. Can you guys really say with a straight face that a man can get pregnant, even if they are a trans man? Doesn't it just feel intuitively wrong to say "a man can get pregnant?" This is what causes a lot of conservatives to claim that liberals can't follow science because they claim "men can get pregnant."

 

[SigmatheZeta]

Hi I am new here but I have been reading for about a month. I hope this is the right forum for this because it has become a political issue. If it's the wrong forum, I apologize.

With that said, I am looking to see if any of you guys can help me understand sex and gender and transgender people because it has been driving me nuts when I think about it. I want to say first off that I have no problem with trans people. If someone wants to dress or act a certain way, that is fine by me. My issue is with the gender/sex subject.

I have been reading the subject and I hear, "Sex and gender are different. They have nothing to do with each other." This confuses me because people say around 99% of people are "cisgender", which means your gender and sex match. But how can gender and sex "match" if they have nothing to do with each other? Saying they match is implying that sex and gender are the same thing and there is a right way and a wrong way, yet people insist on saying they have nothing to do with each other. For example, if someone is a born male and identifies as a man, people say they are cisgender because their sex and gender match. This implies there is a right way to be male and a right way to be female. Otherwise, how can you say they match?

Transgender people are "people whose gender identity differs from their birth sex." But if sex and gender have nothing to do with each other, how can someone state that "my gender differs from my birth sex?" This implies that a person's gender should be the same as their birth sex. But, this is in direct contradiction to the fact that people say, "sex and gender are different and have nothing to do with each other." But for 99% of people, sex and gender are the same. For example, when people find out the sex of their baby, they say, "it's a boy" or "it's a girl." But how can they say this when they only know the baby's sex and not their gender? We are told that only the person themselves can decide what gender they are. So this implies parents should say, "I found out my baby will be born with a penis. But, I have no idea if it will be a boy or girl because they haven't decided their gender yet." Nobody says this. They all say "boy" or "girl" and give the baby "he" and "she" pronouns before they are even born. This implies sex and gender are the same thing. So if 99% of people are comfortable with their gender and sex being the same thing, how can people still claim gender and sex have nothing to do with each other?

So when trans women say, "I was assigned male at birth but I now identify as a woman," this implies that people who are assigned male at birth are supposed to identify as a man. But, how can this be if sex and gender have nothing to do with each other? If someone is assigned male at birth and identifies as a woman, how can this even be considered "transgender" if sex and gender are supposed to have nothing to do with each other? One can just as easily say, "I was born male and I identify as a man and I am transgender becuase sex and gender have nothing to do with each other. Being a man doesn't have anything to do with my penis." The term "transgender" implies that gender and sex should match each other. But if they match this implies gender and sex are the same thing despite the fact people say they are completely different.

Can you guys see the point I am trying to make here? I am trying to explain it as best as I can. Let me summarize: On one hand, people say gender and sex are completely different and have nothing to do with each other. Yet, 99% of people are "cisgender," which means that your gender and sex are the same thing. Can anyone solve this contradiction? I've been trying to for a while and I can't think of a good answer. This is why I'm asking you guys. As I said, I have no problem with trans people. I just feel like there is a big contradiction here with these definitions. I hope you guys can answer these questions for me. I've been driving myself nuts thinking about this.

It has something to do with the fractional anisotropy of my right inferior occipito-frontal fasciculus, which is a gray matter tract that passes backward from my frontal lobe along the lateral border caudate nucleus and radiates in a fan-like manner, on the corona radiata, into the temporal and occipital lobes lateral to the posterior and inferior cornua. Effectively, a certain set of signals, between my frontal and occipital lobe, are drawn into a "tighter beam" than those of a cis-male.

This is most likely true specifically because I am attracted to the male sex. Transgender women that are bisexual or homosexual, with respect to their gender identity, exist, but the causation has been suspected to be different in a large proportion of cases. I do not pretend to understand that other proposed causation. I think that it has something to do with the putamen and some part of the hypothalamus.

Anyhow, while that white matter tract, alone, is only partly cross-gender, it is also true that gay men and androsexual trans-women are frequently found to have ultra-cross-sex development in certain other parts of their brains. Interestingly enough, some of us can actually be more female than female, in certain respects. This might be selection bias, though. I suspect that it takes a stronger neurological bias for an assigned male at birth (AMAB) to admit to being attracted to men than it takes for the average cis-woman to stay content with her socially expected role in society.

Exceptions to all of this most likely do exist, but I doubt that I am one of them.

Thank you for replying. It is interesting you mention this stuff about the brain. I have been doing some reading and it says there are differences in transgender brains and male and female brains. However, transgender brains are still male or female, right? So why call it a transgender brain? I also read some articles about how there are no differences between brains and it's a sexist myth. How do I know which is true? Also, why do transgender people claim they are transitioning from male to female or female to male? I thought it was only about gender and you can't change your sex? This is all so confusing to me.

I also would like a response to post #58. Can you guys really say with a straight face that a man can get pregnant, even if they are a trans man? Doesn't it just feel intuitively wrong to say "a man can get pregnant?" This is what causes a lot of conservatives to claim that liberals can't follow science because they claim "men can get pregnant."

\What has you confused is ideology. I do not care a rodent's rectum about it. I am telling you that my brain is physically different, and I really preferred being called "she" and "her" when you talk about me in conversation, bitte-danke. Beyond that, I believe that most of the ideology about gender, either way, is stupid. I cannot be bothered to provide you with several years' worth of education about neuroanatomy, and getting my gender right, whenever you talk about me with others, is probably the easiest way that you will ever make friends with somebody.

Furthermore, I disagree with the deconstructionist approach. According to Nick Haslam, it is a counterproductive approach, and when fighting back against essentialism, we are better off focusing on entitative essentialism, which is the kind of stereotyping that denies diversity within a group or intersectionality with other groups. For instance, a transgender man can also be a misogynistic conservative Protestant that likes to watch football. Not all of them are like that, but they can be. Transgender women can be like that, too. Some trans-women are also rednecks that like to go deer-hunting in the autumn. A surprising number of them are fat and lazy computer programmers that have not actually looked believably feminine since middle-school. Only a few of them actually look like the glamorous models off of RuPaul, and a truly amazing number of them just look like normal, everyday people. The point is that we come in all possible flavors. You might even like some of us.

See Essentialist beliefs about social categories, by Nick Haslam.

I have given you the neurobiological explanation for why I am the way that I am. If you need sources, then I am happy to provide them for you, but you could always look them up on your own if you prefer. Also, I have given you simple instructions for how to make a good start on turning me into a friend if that were ever your inclination: just call me by the gender that I prefer to be called.

I am not complicated. Life is complicated, but I am not. When you get right down to it, I am the easiest person ever.

 

[Metaphor]

(And I think it's even more the case with sexual alignment. I'm in the camp that doesn't think there really is such a thing as homosexuality--or heterosexuality. There is no internal concept of being attracted to the same gender or the opposite gender. Rather, it makes much more sense if there is an attracted-to-males system and an attracted-to-females system. A model with one control being heterosexual/homosexual and one being intensity does a much poorer job of explaining bisexuality and asexuality than two independent systems, one for attracted to men and one for attracted to women, each with an intensity control.)

Non.

Nobody is attracted to the same "gender". People are attracted to zero, one, or both sexes.

Well, that's a load of nonsense. That's not information you're even privy to when you're just out on the street looking for someone to date.

That people believe this kind of nonsense scares me. How often do you believe you are mistaken about the sex of people you are looking at?

We're highly dependent on how someone presents themselves - a component of their gender - in feeling attraction to them.

I have never, ever asked somebody's gender when I look at them or when I sleep with them. I'm attracted to male bodies, not 'the male gender'.

Gay men, for example, have personalities that cover the entire spectrum of what people would call 'butch' to 'femme'. I don't rule out 'femme' men; I rule out women.

Any trans woman can tell you that being hit on by straight men is a regular occurrence in their lives whether or not it is wanted.

This would be an extraordinary phenomenon if it were true - 100% of trans women get regular male attention! Of course, I don't believe that's true, especially since transwomen who are attracted to women routinely complain about the 'transphobia' of cis lesbians who do not want to date them.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

@Metaphor

My life is very simple. People like me, or they dislike me. If they like me, then most of them would call me whatever I asked them to call me. If they disliked me, then I would be shocked if they did not do the opposite just because it annoyed me.

You can't please all the people all the time.

 

[Metaphor]

@Metaphor

My life is very simple. People like me, or they dislike me. If they like me, then most of them would call me whatever I asked them to call me. If they disliked me, then I would be shocked if they did not do the opposite just because it annoyed me.

You can't please all the people all the time.

Like most people, I do lots of things for friends that I wouldn't do for strangers. I have vegan and vegetarian friends, and on the rare occassions I can be arsed to host lunch or dinner, I cater to their dietary preference.

Trans ideologists, like many on this thread, flat out state 'it's not difficult', but of course they are begging the question. It is 'not difficult' for them because they believe pronouns refer to gender identity and not sex. Trans people get 'misgendered' because trans people often do not pass and it is obvious to people. People instinctively use the appropriate sexed pronoun. It would be one thing for the trans ideologists on this thread to acknowledge the cognitive difficulty in looking at the body of a naked male transwoman with an erection and mentally reconciling that person as 'she'. In fact, I cannot mentally reconcile it, and 'she/her' pronouns for such a person, coming from me, would be uttering a falsehood. But it's quite another that they think the only possible reason that anybody would 'misgender' is malicious, evil, transphobic spite.

I also think there are political implications with using pronouns that conflict with the sex of a person. If it were all that trans people were asking is that people be polite and try and use their preferred pronouns, and nobody were demanding the addition of potentially hundreds of sets of neopronouns, and laws had not changed so that the State can now punish people for 'misgendering', that could be a compromise.

But of course trans ideologists, just like George Orwell, know that language is the key to shaping--or erasing--thoughts. It is not the case--it has never been the case--that men and women were separated in sports based on their gender identity, but on their sexed bodies. Nevertheless, trans ideologists have said it is appropriate that we separate sports based on gender identity and not sex, and the most radical do not want to brook any compromise on this. As in, no demands for testosterone suppression or any other measure. Any male-bodied person who wants to compete in women's sports needs only to make the claim they are a woman. I find that completely unacceptable and, to be honest, a kind of delusional collective madness.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

@Metaphor

My life is very simple. People like me, or they dislike me. If they like me, then most of them would call me whatever I asked them to call me. If they disliked me, then I would be shocked if they did not do the opposite just because it annoyed me.

You can't please all the people all the time.

Like most people, I do lots of things for friends that I wouldn't do for strangers. I have vegan and vegetarian friends, and on the rare occassions I can be arsed to host lunch or dinner, I cater to their dietary preference.

Trans ideologists, like many on this thread, flat out state 'it's not difficult', but of course they are begging the question. It is 'not difficult' for them because they believe pronouns refer to gender identity and not sex. Trans people get 'misgendered' because trans people often do not pass and it is obvious to people. People instinctively use the appropriate sexed pronoun. It would be one thing for the trans ideologists on this thread to acknowledge the cognitive difficulty in looking at the body of a naked male transwoman with an erection and mentally reconciling that person as 'she'. In fact, I cannot mentally reconcile it, and 'she/her' pronouns for such a person, coming from me, would be uttering a falsehood. But it's quite another that they think the only possible reason that anybody would 'misgender' is malicious, evil, transphobic spite.

I also think there are political implications with using pronouns that conflict with the sex of a person. If it were all that trans people were asking is that people be polite and try and use their preferred pronouns, and nobody were demanding the addition of potentially hundreds of sets of neopronouns, and laws had not changed so that the State can now punish people for 'misgendering', that could be a compromise.

But of course trans ideologists, just like George Orwell, know that language is the key to shaping--or erasing--thoughts. It is not the case--it has never been the case--that men and women were separated in sports based on their gender identity, but on their sexed bodies. Nevertheless, trans ideologists have said it is appropriate that we separate sports based on gender identity and not sex, and the most radical do not want to brook any compromise on this. As in, no demands for testosterone suppression or any other measure. Any male-bodied person who wants to compete in women's sports needs only to make the claim they are a woman. I find that completely unacceptable and, to be honest, a kind of delusional collective madness.

*laughs out loud* I've been called more entertaining things than mad. The only reason I even know about neopronouns is the old sci-fi novels I used to read. When I was a kid, I identified with intersex characters from those dusty, old books. It was a cute idea, and some of my old friends let me get away with it because we were young and still just went along with stuff. I will not lie: not all of my childhood was happy. However, those were some of the best times in my entire life. It was so much fun. It was the "sie/hir" set. .

I would never ask you to call me those because it was an intimate part of my experience. You weren't a part of it.

Most of the time, though, I am one of those people that keep their noses buried in Elsevier articles, so I have a little bit different of a perspective on these sorts of things from what you are probably used to. I can yak all day about that stuff. Transgender people are genuinely born with their brains connected a little bit differently. I can support this point-of-view with tungsten-hard scientific research if you want to go there.

 

[Metaphor]

@Metaphor

My life is very simple. People like me, or they dislike me. If they like me, then most of them would call me whatever I asked them to call me. If they disliked me, then I would be shocked if they did not do the opposite just because it annoyed me.

You can't please all the people all the time.

Like most people, I do lots of things for friends that I wouldn't do for strangers. I have vegan and vegetarian friends, and on the rare occassions I can be arsed to host lunch or dinner, I cater to their dietary preference.

Trans ideologists, like many on this thread, flat out state 'it's not difficult', but of course they are begging the question. It is 'not difficult' for them because they believe pronouns refer to gender identity and not sex. Trans people get 'misgendered' because trans people often do not pass and it is obvious to people. People instinctively use the appropriate sexed pronoun. It would be one thing for the trans ideologists on this thread to acknowledge the cognitive difficulty in looking at the body of a naked male transwoman with an erection and mentally reconciling that person as 'she'. In fact, I cannot mentally reconcile it, and 'she/her' pronouns for such a person, coming from me, would be uttering a falsehood. But it's quite another that they think the only possible reason that anybody would 'misgender' is malicious, evil, transphobic spite.

I also think there are political implications with using pronouns that conflict with the sex of a person. If it were all that trans people were asking is that people be polite and try and use their preferred pronouns, and nobody were demanding the addition of potentially hundreds of sets of neopronouns, and laws had not changed so that the State can now punish people for 'misgendering', that could be a compromise.

But of course trans ideologists, just like George Orwell, know that language is the key to shaping--or erasing--thoughts. It is not the case--it has never been the case--that men and women were separated in sports based on their gender identity, but on their sexed bodies. Nevertheless, trans ideologists have said it is appropriate that we separate sports based on gender identity and not sex, and the most radical do not want to brook any compromise on this. As in, no demands for testosterone suppression or any other measure. Any male-bodied person who wants to compete in women's sports needs only to make the claim they are a woman. I find that completely unacceptable and, to be honest, a kind of delusional collective madness.

*laughs out loud* I've been called more entertaining things than mad. The only reason I even know about neopronouns is the old sci-fi novels I used to read. When I was a kid, I identified with intersex characters from those dusty, old books. It was a cute idea, and some of my old friends let me get away with it because we were young and still just went along with stuff. I will not lie: not all of my childhood was happy. However, those were some of the best times in my entire life. It was so much fun. It was the "sie/hir" set. .

I would never ask you to call me those because it was an intimate part of my experience. You weren't a part of it.

Most of the time, though, I am one of those people that keep their noses buried in Elsevier articles, so I have a little bit different of a perspective on these sorts of things from what you are probably used to. I can yak all day about that stuff. Transgender people are genuinely born with their brains connected a little bit differently. I can support this point-of-view with tungsten-hard scientific research if you want to go there.

I didn't call you mad; I called trans ideologists mad (trans ideologists are not trans people who are ideologists, people who have a particular gender ideology are trans ideologists). Most trans ideologists are not trans.

I have never said that the brains of trans people are not different to the brains of non-trans people. Nothing important in my arguments hinges on it, though. Sex is not a brain state.

Trans ideologists have clouded the waters--on purpose--about the difference between sex and gender. Indeed, trans ideology has been so successful on this front that facts of biology--like that mammals cannot change sex--are now routinely trashed as wrong and bigoted. And I suppose if you actually believed that humans can change sex--which they cannot--you might also believe that it is fair for transwomen to play against women.

So in a way I think I can understand some positions of trans ideologists, as those positions can logically flow from premises they believe. But they believe faulty premises, and they gaslight people who believe true ones.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

@Metaphor It is substantially less complicated if transgender girls are put started on HRT at the beginning of puberty, rather than after its completion. I sensed that I was transgender at the very start of my puberty, and that was during the mid-1990's, when that kind of thinking might have actually gotten me expelled for being a disgusting pervert and therefore somehow a threat to other kids. I still knew. A transgender girl that starts transitioning at the same age as the normal age, for girls to go through puberty, cannot be easily distinguished from cis-girls. Their performance ought to be commensurate with that of their female peers.

 

[Metaphor]

@Metaphor It is substantially less complicated if transgender girls are put started on HRT at the beginning of puberty, rather than after its completion. I sensed that I was transgender at the very start of my puberty, and that was during the mid-1990's, when that kind of thinking might have actually gotten me expelled for being a disgusting pervert and therefore somehow a threat to other kids. I still knew. A transgender girl that starts transitioning at the same age as the normal age, for girls to go through puberty, cannot be easily distinguished from cis-girls. Their performance ought to be commensurate with that of their female peers.

There may be more 'wiggle room' for male-bodied people who never went through a male puberty to compete as women on the women's side. But that isn't what trans ideologists demand. They want any male who utters the words 'I am a woman' or 'I am a girl' to be able to play in women's sports - whether he has had a male puberty or not, and whether he takes any testosterone blockers or not.

But even that wiggle room is begging the question. Why is puberty supposed to be the dividing line? There are physiological differences between the sexes in pre-pubescent children, too. There are sex differences in athletic records achieved by sex from children as young as 5 year old (http://age-records.125mb.com/).

 

[Generation55]

\What has you confused is ideology. I do not care a rodent's rectum about it. I am telling you that my brain is physically different, and I really preferred being called "she" and "her" when you talk about me in conversation, bitte-danke. Beyond that, I believe that most of the ideology about gender, either way, is stupid. I cannot be bothered to provide you with several years' worth of education about neuroanatomy, and getting my gender right, whenever you talk about me with others, is probably the easiest way that you will ever make friends with somebody.

Furthermore, I disagree with the deconstructionist approach. According to Nick Haslam, it is a counterproductive approach, and when fighting back against essentialism, we are better off focusing on entitative essentialism, which is the kind of stereotyping that denies diversity within a group or intersectionality with other groups. For instance, a transgender man can also be a misogynistic conservative Protestant that likes to watch football. Not all of them are like that, but they can be. Transgender women can be like that, too. Some trans-women are also rednecks that like to go deer-hunting in the autumn. A surprising number of them are fat and lazy computer programmers that have not actually looked believably feminine since middle-school. Only a few of them actually look like the glamorous models off of RuPaul, and a truly amazing number of them just look like normal, everyday people. The point is that we come in all possible flavors. You might even like some of us.

See Essentialist beliefs about social categories, by Nick Haslam.

I have given you the neurobiological explanation for why I am the way that I am. If you need sources, then I am happy to provide them for you, but you could always look them up on your own if you prefer. Also, I have given you simple instructions for how to make a good start on turning me into a friend if that were ever your inclination: just call me by the gender that I prefer to be called.

I am not complicated. Life is complicated, but I am not. When you get right down to it, I am the easiest person ever.

I can see what you are saying. I also never said I don't like trans people. I do. My issue is with the definitions of these words "man" and "woman." I can see pictures of trans women and trans men online. They don't bother me. What does bother me is me wondering, "What do they mean by "man" and woman?"

Also things like, "you don't have to wear dresses and make up to be a woman" but a lot of trans women DO wear dresses and makeup which seems to be conforming to the stereotype feminists are trying to erase in the first place. Same how trans men like to dress in stereotypical male clothes while claiming that gender norms shouldn't exist. It just seems weird to hear someone say, "You don't think I'm a man? Look at my beard! Look at my motorcycle jacket! Look at my boots!" But, feminists would say "those things don't make someone a man." You see what I'm saying? Not trying to be hateful or hurtful here. It's just confusing to me.

And what do you do about medicine? A trans woman gets into a car accident or something and the paramedics come, I think it would be helpful for the paramedics to know that her body is male, right? This is just so confusing to me. There's a difference in medicine for women's bodies and men's bodies. It's not as simple as, "just treat me like a good person!" I can do that, but what about every other scenario that doesn't involve simple conversation?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But this doesn't explain why there are trans women who don't mind having a penis and trans men who don't mind having a vagina. There are trans people like you say who hate their bodies and wish the body was different, but there are some who are fine with their genitals. Why is this so?

Some people care, some people don't. Since you are new here you probably don't realize I'm actually male (both biologically and mentally)--I have the male spelling of the name which was always quite rare and is basically extinct this century. I also have a voice that somehow sounds female on the phone. I'm routinely misgendered but I don't care and usually only correct people when there's some reason it matters.

You also (but not just you) also ignored my point about David Reimer. He had a botched circumcision that severely injured his penis. The psychologist John Money said, "Since sex and gender different, just raise him as a girl. It won't matter." It didn't work and he committed suicide later in life. This shows that sex and gender are the same thing. If they were different, he would've had no problem being a girl.

Huh? I think you have it backwards. If they had been the same thing he wouldn't have had a problem.

 

[Generation55]

But this doesn't explain why there are trans women who don't mind having a penis and trans men who don't mind having a vagina. There are trans people like you say who hate their bodies and wish the body was different, but there are some who are fine with their genitals. Why is this so?

Some people care, some people don't. Since you are new here you probably don't realize I'm actually male (both biologically and mentally)--I have the male spelling of the name which was always quite rare and is basically extinct this century. I also have a voice that somehow sounds female on the phone. I'm routinely misgendered but I don't care and usually only correct people when there's some reason it matters.

You also (but not just you) also ignored my point about David Reimer. He had a botched circumcision that severely injured his penis. The psychologist John Money said, "Since sex and gender different, just raise him as a girl. It won't matter." It didn't work and he committed suicide later in life. This shows that sex and gender are the same thing. If they were different, he would've had no problem being a girl.

Huh? I think you have it backwards. If they had been the same thing he wouldn't have had a problem.

John Money is the one who came up with the idea that sex and gender are different. He was going by his assumption so that's why he said that raising David as a girl would've been no big deal. It turned out he was wrong. David was born male and he always saw himself as a man. He couldn't handle not having a penis. His sex "matched" his gender. He was considered a cisman.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

...
And what do you do about medicine? A trans woman gets into a car accident or something and the paramedics come, I think it would be helpful for the paramedics to know that her body is male, right? This is just so confusing to me. There's a difference in medicine for women's bodies and men's bodies. It's not as simple as, "just treat me like a good person!" I can do that, but what about every other scenario that doesn't involve simple conversation?

I think you may have just answered your own question. Medical treatments that rely upon knowing a person's sex, will require knowledge of their physical sex. But doctors must also deal with the patient as a person, which means knowing the person's gender. I presume that, because physically transgendering will often involve hormonal treatments which may alter the course of treatment for the current medical issue, the doctor will need the complete picture. And the complete picture will be found in the patient's medical records.

So, this is something new for the doctor to deal with. But, then again, so was Covid-19. And doctors already treat people who have underlying conditions, like Powell's blood cancer, differently than they would treat someone without that condition.

Each person has their own unique medical history. And, each person has their own combination of sex and gender.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

False. Nouns in general don't have a sex but they have a gender. Humans have a sex and some humans have a gender, but noun usage in humans has always been sexed.

Depends on the language.

Have you ever noticed how Chinese speakers butcher gender? That's because their language does not have gendered nouns other than a few family relationship words.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

\What has you confused is ideology. I do not care a rodent's rectum about it. I am telling you that my brain is physically different, and I really preferred being called "she" and "her" when you talk about me in conversation, bitte-danke. Beyond that, I believe that most of the ideology about gender, either way, is stupid. I cannot be bothered to provide you with several years' worth of education about neuroanatomy, and getting my gender right, whenever you talk about me with others, is probably the easiest way that you will ever make friends with somebody.

Furthermore, I disagree with the deconstructionist approach. According to Nick Haslam, it is a counterproductive approach, and when fighting back against essentialism, we are better off focusing on entitative essentialism, which is the kind of stereotyping that denies diversity within a group or intersectionality with other groups. For instance, a transgender man can also be a misogynistic conservative Protestant that likes to watch football. Not all of them are like that, but they can be. Transgender women can be like that, too. Some trans-women are also rednecks that like to go deer-hunting in the autumn. A surprising number of them are fat and lazy computer programmers that have not actually looked believably feminine since middle-school. Only a few of them actually look like the glamorous models off of RuPaul, and a truly amazing number of them just look like normal, everyday people. The point is that we come in all possible flavors. You might even like some of us.

See Essentialist beliefs about social categories, by Nick Haslam.

I have given you the neurobiological explanation for why I am the way that I am. If you need sources, then I am happy to provide them for you, but you could always look them up on your own if you prefer. Also, I have given you simple instructions for how to make a good start on turning me into a friend if that were ever your inclination: just call me by the gender that I prefer to be called.

I am not complicated. Life is complicated, but I am not. When you get right down to it, I am the easiest person ever.

I can see what you are saying. I also never said I don't like trans people. I do. My issue is with the definitions of these words "man" and "woman." I can see pictures of trans women and trans men online. They don't bother me. What does bother me is me wondering, "What do they mean by "man" and woman?"

Also things like, "you don't have to wear dresses and make up to be a woman" but a lot of trans women DO wear dresses and makeup which seems to be conforming to the stereotype feminists are trying to erase in the first place. Same how trans men like to dress in stereotypical male clothes while claiming that gender norms shouldn't exist. It just seems weird to hear someone say, "You don't think I'm a man? Look at my beard! Look at my motorcycle jacket! Look at my boots!" But, feminists would say "those things don't make someone a man." You see what I'm saying? Not trying to be hateful or hurtful here. It's just confusing to me.

And what do you do about medicine? A trans woman gets into a car accident or something and the paramedics come, I think it would be helpful for the paramedics to know that her body is male, right? This is just so confusing to me. There's a difference in medicine for women's bodies and men's bodies. It's not as simple as, "just treat me like a good person!" I can do that, but what about every other scenario that doesn't involve simple conversation?

I don't pay very much attention to what normal people think about anything. I am a beautiful mutant, and my inclination is to stay that way.

The truth is that transgender people find it just as hard as everybody else to understand it. If you think it's weird from the outside, then it's weirder from this side. It is like a seriously bad acid trip, my friend, and it's not even good acid. It's that brown acid that Chip Monck was warning the people at Woodstock about. It's so horrifying that 40% of us attempt to kill ourselves within our lifetimes, and it's worse for trans-men than it is for trans-women! The worst people to ask about this subject can be the transgender people, themselves. Most of us can barely cope.

The mainstream transgender community has begun to cling to an ideology that is not entirely wrong, but it's not entirely right, in my opinion. They have imbued something that is actually based partly in factual evidence with a substantial amount of magical thinking, and that's anathema to how I think. I understand why they are doing it, but they are just making it more confusing.

What happened was that, sometime during my gestation in my mother's uterus, shortly before I was born, my brain got saturated with a flood of estrogen or suffered from an unusual shortage of testosterone, and it happened at exactly the same time when certain very delicate structures, in my brain, were taking shape.

Well, apparently, we humans are evolved to be able to comprehend what sex we are. Regardless of what dumbass deconstructionist types of feminists say, men and women are born with different brains, and most of the time, they know which sex they are. MOST of the time. Almost all of the time. Think about it: 97-99% of the time does not make for bad odds that your brain actually thinks it goes with your body!

Unfortunately, we are not really "intelligently designed." If I had an employee that made me something like that, I would tell that employee, "You get a B." I certainly would not worship that employee. If that employee demanded that I worship them, then I would call that unprintable son of two strangers a treacherous scoundrel, and I would have one less employee. It works great until it doesn't, but when it doesn't, then you end up with one very confused and unhappy kid. That's barely a B. It's a B-.

As far as we can tell, the main part of the brain that is responsible for this, at least in one sub-set of transgender people, is the right inferior fronto-ocippital fasciculus. It is nothing in the world except a giant cluster of axons that are stretched out between the front-end and ass-end of your brain, to put it very roughly. Apparently, there is some kind of feedback mechanism in it that is responsible for deciding whether we identify ourselves as female or male.

It's a product of human development not being a perfect process. While it works great, most of the time, it can be a little bit sloppy around the edges.

Anyhow, most transgender people are not really sophisticated enough to understand the brain science stuff, and if you tried to go into that discussion, you would just confuse them. Transgender people can be almost any kinds of people. They can be people like me, but they can also be people from incredibly poor socio-economic backgrounds. Most of the time, they are probably more confused about this stuff than you are, and many of them find it to be mortally terrifying. Most of them are going to use their own idiosyncratic language to try to talk about it, and in most cases, they are going to be about three degrees off from the truth, even though they are generally not wrong. I can't help you much, on that, except to say "pick your battles."

There is literally a part of my brain that does the job of deciding what gender I am supposed to be, and mine did not develop in quite the normal way for a dude. Transition has made me feel substantially more comfortable with being me. That's where the rubber hits the road.

 

[Metaphor]

False. Nouns in general don't have a sex but they have a gender. Humans have a sex and some humans have a gender, but noun usage in humans has always been sexed.

Depends on the language.

Yes, it does, which makes the imperialistic butchering of Hispanic languages, for example, by non-Latino white progressives in America, so funny....and frightening.

Have you ever noticed how Chinese speakers butcher gender? That's because their language does not have gendered nouns other than a few family relationship words.

Actually the primary way I have seen Asians with English as a second language struggle is with plurals rather than gender. But it's certainly true that there is a non-English perspective to the pronoun debate that is not considered by trans ideologists.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I segregate the people I will have sex with and the ones I will not, based on their 'dangly parts'. (Based on their primary and secondary sexual characteristics, actually, but 'dangly parts' usually correlates well enough). Are you suggesting that instead I should abandon my sexual orientation and base it on being oriented to a particular gender?

So? Most people are that way. There are plenty of women I would have absolutely no sexual interest in--and having the wrong anatomy is merely one reason amongst many

Now: if instead you will allow my sexual preference but want me to say "I want to fuck only adult human males", well, I find that odd that I would have to change my language to suit some females who want to call themselves men.

You're fixating on a label rather than the reality. I don't care what the label is.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences.

No surprise here. Personally, I suspect that only people which are at least somewhat bi would date someone with anatomy not matching their presentation.

Once you enter the dating realm trans becomes important. I wouldn't date a trans person--but I wouldn't date a smoker, either. Does that make smokers not women?

 

[Metaphor]

I segregate the people I will have sex with and the ones I will not, based on their 'dangly parts'. (Based on their primary and secondary sexual characteristics, actually, but 'dangly parts' usually correlates well enough). Are you suggesting that instead I should abandon my sexual orientation and base it on being oriented to a particular gender?

So? Most people are that way. There are plenty of women I would have absolutely no sexual interest in--and having the wrong anatomy is merely one reason amongst many

So: I am attracted to sex, not gender, and being told that 'homosexuality' is an attraction to my own gender (and I don't have a gender identity) is gaslighting fucking nonsense.

Now: if instead you will allow my sexual preference but want me to say "I want to fuck only adult human males", well, I find that odd that I would have to change my language to suit some females who want to call themselves men.

You're fixating on a label rather than the reality. I don't care what the label is.

Trans ideologists want to change the label in order to change the reality, and they call anybody who does not conform to their agenda a transphobe.

I intend to resist that.

 

[Metaphor]

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences.

No surprise here. Personally, I suspect that only people which are at least somewhat bi would date someone with anatomy not matching their presentation.

Once you enter the dating realm trans becomes important. I wouldn't date a trans person--but I wouldn't date a smoker, either. Does that make smokers not women?

It makes you a transphobe, according to trans ideologists. It also makes you a 'genital fetishist', according to trans ideologists.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

I segregate the people I will have sex with and the ones I will not, based on their 'dangly parts'. (Based on their primary and secondary sexual characteristics, actually, but 'dangly parts' usually correlates well enough). Are you suggesting that instead I should abandon my sexual orientation and base it on being oriented to a particular gender?

So? Most people are that way. There are plenty of women I would have absolutely no sexual interest in--and having the wrong anatomy is merely one reason amongst many

So: I am attracted to sex, not gender, and being told that 'homosexuality' is an attraction to my own gender (and I don't have a gender identity) is gaslighting fucking nonsense.

Now: if instead you will allow my sexual preference but want me to say "I want to fuck only adult human males", well, I find that odd that I would have to change my language to suit some females who want to call themselves men.

You're fixating on a label rather than the reality. I don't care what the label is.

Trans ideologists want to change the label in order to change the reality, and they call anybody who does not conform to their agenda a transphobe.

I intend to resist that.

Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to do this thing of getting to know somebody, visiting with them several times, getting lost in conversation, getting a little bit stoned once in a while, talking about our feelings, and just letting things happen the way that they happen.

 

[Trausti]

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences.

No surprise here. Personally, I suspect that only people which are at least somewhat bi would date someone with anatomy not matching their presentation.

Once you enter the dating realm trans becomes important. I wouldn't date a trans person--but I wouldn't date a smoker, either. Does that make smokers not women?

It makes you a transphobe, according to trans ideologists. It also makes you a 'genital fetishist', according to trans ideologists.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

I am pretty sure he's gay, @Trausti.

There are plenty of gay men that actually would be glad to literally date a penis. They have this cute idea called a "glory hole." I have also seen some charming pornography involving large boxes with strategically placed holes in them. That is just the tip of the iceberg. This man ought to have absolutely zero trouble getting as much penis as he wants.

I am not so much offended by the fact that some people have hang-ups over my assigned sex at birth, but I just find them to be very confusing.

Most men that end up being attracted to me are bisexual. My husband identifies with the gay community, but he has actually been married to a woman twice in his lifetime. This is characteristic of the kinds of men that I have had in my life. They are not exclusively gay.

However, I am not exactly making very much of an effort to get straight men to feel attracted to me. My clothing is unisex, I look pretty unisex, and I tend to do this weird thing of having conversations with dudes before actually thinking about the possibility of having sex with them. It can be weeks before I actually get undressed in front of a guy, so by the time we get to that point, the chemistry is already there and out-in-the-open.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

I guess that what confuses me is why anybody lets an intellectual concern dictate their sex lives for them. The way I think about it, you are either attracted to somebody or not. It has never been difficult for me to find happiness, and I think that part of the reason why is that, in my sexuality and my romantic inclinations, I just let stuff happen. I let go.

I like my way.

 

[Generation55]

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences.

No surprise here. Personally, I suspect that only people which are at least somewhat bi would date someone with anatomy not matching their presentation.

Once you enter the dating realm trans becomes important. I wouldn't date a trans person--but I wouldn't date a smoker, either. Does that make smokers not women?

It makes you a transphobe, according to trans ideologists. It also makes you a 'genital fetishist', according to trans ideologists.

This just made me think of something. If a trans person is OK with their genitalia, say for example a trans woman who gets surgery to alter the body but doesn't have a problem with the penis, how can they be trans? Wouldn't their gender be matching their sex? This is so confusing.

 

[Jarhyn]

The definitions we have are adequate: when someone says "I am a man" they say "you, person, treat me as you would any man". Same with "woman".

How should a man be treated? How should a woman be treated?

The fabulous part about this is that YOU are the one who gets to decide that. That's how the game is played. They ask to be treated "the way Emily Lake treats women", and that's all they get to ask. If they demand be treated in a certain way "as a woman", then they go to far.

You know how you treat "women".

You treat half of everyone like so, or thereabouts.

They are asking you extend exactly that courtesy.

 

[TV and credit cards]

This study is approachable: Structural connections in the brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation
For me, it does a good job of defining sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It might be helpful to others.

 

[Metaphor]

This study is approachable: Structural connections in the brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation
For me, it does a good job of defining sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It might be helpful to others.

The study does not even define what it means by 'gender', except circularly.

 

[ZiprHead]

This study is approachable: Structural connections in the brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation
For me, it does a good job of defining sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It might be helpful to others.

The study does not even define what it means by 'gender', except circularly.

Sexual orientation signifies the sex of the object of one’s sexual attraction, whereas gender identity denotes the sex and gender role one identifies with.

What's circular about that?

 

[SigmatheZeta]

@Metaphor I would avoid the fallacy of reification, here. By the word "gender," we are literally referring to something that is done by the delicate microstructures in your brain. We cannot even come close to examining it closely without diffusion tensor imaging or something even more advanced. For reasons that are still not well-understood, your brain usually knows what sex you are, but sometimes, it is reversed.

The behavior caused by this reversal is weird, but it is also manageable. Young people can be "socially transitioned" early in life. In fact, if we did not have the technology that we currently have, then social transitioning alone might work in most cases if the people around them were open-minded and decent. Regardless of why, the system works, at least if getting people to live longer is what you are trying for.

It's just another issue like the blind spot in the human eye. There is no "intelligent design." We are not a "perfect creation." We are born with bugs, of one kind or another, all of the time. The fact that gender dysphoria pops up, every once in a while, is just another example of that.

Social transitioning of transgender kids, though, is really the easiest bug-fix ever.

Anyhow, gender is real, but nobody can really show it to you, in the literal and physically manifest version, without having you slog through several hundred pages of diffusion tensor imaging research.

The concept of "gender" that is being peddled by, as you call them, "trans-ideologists" is just a very sloppy metaphorical explanation for the same thing, but it should not be taken too literally. Unfortunately, transgender people are just as human as any other humans, and most humans believe in one kind of magical thinking or another. Transgender people are no exception. They often take the metaphorical explanation of "gender," and they turn it into a patently ridiculous system of magical thinking.

Well, that problem leads you to thinking that the whole thing is sketchy, and I get that. The problem is that you are partway right, just not entirely right. They take the metaphor too far, and they take it too literally. They make it sound like the whole thing is made-up.

Either that, or they go into some sort of deconstructionist parallel universe, which I see as problematic and toxic. I think that deconstructionism is just as problematic as religion. In spite of what deconstructionists tend to think, the brain is not really just gray mud that you can shape any way that you want to. Contrary to what deconstructionists think, there are delicate microstructures in our brains that we are stuck with for life. 97-99% of us will always be "cis-gender." Those microstructures will always come out with a particular type of weird only once in a while. The deconstructionists are wrong.

Worse, the deconstructionists make it harder for people to see the underlying empirically self-evident truth. Again, the only way that you can look at the cause, in the literal sense, is indirectly through diffusion tensor imaging studies, but what is a little bit easier to observe is that socially transitioned kids live longer and have less coping issues. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends something close to what I am talking about, here.

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/142/4/e20182162 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2162)

Again, transgender people are still people. People cannot really understand most things without some kind of metaphor, but if you give them a metaphor that they can use, then they are probably going to try to take it literally, which leads to magical thinking. People can be like that, and I am afraid that transgender people are not always exceptions. They are not always going to be the kinds of people that are going to be receptive to the complicated truth. You could not reasonably be considered to be at fault for that, so I suggest picking your battles.

"Gender" is both a very messy metaphor and something that is based on a real thing. It's a bad metaphor, but it's the best metaphor we've got. The real explanation takes too long for most people. I get exhausted even trying to explain all of this stuff to other transgender people that are reasonably intelligent.


With warm regards,
Sigma

 

[Jarhyn]

This study is approachable: Structural connections in the brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation
For me, it does a good job of defining sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It might be helpful to others.

Something I've been struggling to align well enough to get words under the complexities of the thought...

Imagine two people.

One person sees the idea of being able to have sex with a person, and their sexual organs swell.

Another person sees their companion make a conscious decision to put ideas of sexuality aside for the night and just "spend honest time", and their sexual organs swell.

One of these things I would say is "masculine" and one is "feminine".

Of course, I'm with Sigmathe and this is what I've been going on about for years. It's not "a thought in the head", it's "a stable, persistent physical state" just as much as the "stable physical state" of the genitals. It just happens one is way easier to observe.

Someone should call Emily Lake in here though... Seems like something she would be interested in reading, I think?

 

[Toni]

This study is approachable: Structural connections in the brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation
For me, it does a good job of defining sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It might be helpful to others.

Something I've been struggling to align well enough to get words under the complexities of the thought...

Imagine two people.

One person sees the idea of being able to have sex with a person, and their sexual organs swell.

Another person sees their companion make a conscious decision to put ideas of sexuality aside for the night and just "spend honest time", and their sexual organs swell.

One of these things I would say is "masculine" and one is "feminine".

Of course, I'm with Sigmathe and this is what I've been going on about for years. It's not "a thought in the head", it's "a stable, persistent physical state" just as much as the "stable physical state" of the genitals. It just happens one is way easier to observe.

Someone should call Emily Lake in here though... Seems like something she would be interested in reading, I think?

I definitely do not see these as masculine or feminine, but as masculine stereotype and feminine stereotype.