What do you think of the trans issue? My view:
if you have a y-chromosome, you’re a male. If you don’t, you’re a female. PERIOD. Gender and sex are the same. Bruce Jenner is a man, as is Bradley Manning. Chastity Bono is a female, and Aydian is a female too.
I accept that gay men are biologically wired differently than straight men. This is obvious to me because a straight man’s penis gets hard to female facilitated stimuli, therefore it follows that gay means a gay man’s penis gets stimulated by male stimuli. I heard gay men’s brains are wired differently, and given how we could actually witness a manifestation of that, I believe it.
Now given that, what is the difference between a gay man and a “transgender woman?” Can someone please enumerate that?
Sometimes, I feel like the trans-rights movement is just a stalking horse for gay rights; it makes gay "cis"genders appear more normal to people who waver on gay rights. It also seems like the transvestite movement is a way to effectively erase being gay for those who can’t handle it. Or that its a last frontier for gay rights, now that gays can serve openly and marry in 50 states, they don’t want the fight to be over.
Trans-rights activists claim that using the term “real woman” is transphobic, as they say is questioning the “womanhood” of a transgender. That being said, is it transphobic for a heterosexual “cisgender” male to not be attracted to transwomen, if a transwoman is really a woman?
Will some day, straight cismen be expected to consider transwomen for sexual/romantic partners, as some kind of next frontier of “equality?”
Well, medical science and people who actually have compassion for those suffering from a significant medical condition disagree with you. It’s pretty clear that you’re not familiar at all with the scientific side of things, or even with the definition of gender, which seems to be really common for people who are transphobic. I don’t understand why people clueless on this topic want to hurt people who are simply trying to live their lives in the only way that medical science has found that works for them, but it seems to be a common theme.
Also, “transvestite” and “transgender” are two different things. I’m sure it’s possible for someone to be transgender and to enjoy cross-dressing, and conservatives seem to want to force transgender people to dress as the wrong gender, but they’re not interchangeable terms.
Since this is great debates, what’s your reason for disagreeing with all of the medical research on transgender people? Is there some reasoned justification for said disagreement?
As is this Great Debates I’ll submit no opinion on the first sentence. But do expand on the second sentence - how, in your opinion, have “liberals” taken “things WAY too far”? Where do you think the line should be drawn and why?
Medical science says a y-chromosome signals male, no y-chromosome female. The change to the DSM 5 on this was completely political, influenced by politics. Also, psychiatry has gotten it wrong before; after all, before the '70s they tried to treat gays, even tho being gay is actually a real thing that can be observed (hence the issue of what makes one’s penis/vaj get hard/wet), not some metaphysical concept cooked up in gender studies professors “peer reviewed” papers.
Derek, imagine that somehow your brain was transplanted into the body of a woman. Would it feel right to you? Would you feel right being a woman? Would you want to dress the way society expects women to dress? Would you feel that all your body parts “belong” and match your personal identity of who you are?
Or would you feel like something is missing, and your body actually does not match the person you truly are in your brain?
From my understanding, that’s how transgender people feel. There is an unchangeable and unfixable (unless they transition) disconnect between who they are, inside their brain, and their bodies. In their mind they are a gender that doesn’t match their biological sex.
Further, from my understanding, even biological sex is not binary. Some people are born with a y chromosome but female physical sexual characteristics, and vice versa. Some people are born with “in-between” physical sexual characteristics, and doctors after birth modify these to “match” one sex or the other. But they may grow up always feeling wrong – that the doctors made a mistake and chose the wrong sex.
It seems to me to be highly uncompassionate and cruel to decide that these people are lying, or perverted, and/or otherwise not deserving of society’s compassion and protection.
I clearly said that for genetic mutations , that’s one thing.
How can we actually prove this?
Imagine a skinny person who consistently thinks he/she is fat. Or a body builder who thinks he’s not cut/buff enough. That’s called body dysmorphia. It’s a mental illness. You treat it, and adapt. And you don’t shove down changes to everyone else and force everyone else to pay for it (like government healthcare paying for sex changes). I can “feel” a lot of things; but the y-chromosome is the y-chromosome. Transgender men are just really un-femme lesbians, trans-women are just really effeminate men. They should be protected by the same hate crime laws as other LGB people.
Maybe you and I might disagree on some points, but please, how do you respond to the latter part of the post, re: attraction.
I didn’t see anything in your posts about “mutations”, though not all such intersex conditions are caused by genetic mutations (others can be caused by environmental conditions like toxins, or random development errors inside the womb).
But how do you suggest society treat people born with intersex conditions who later determine that their gender does not match their biological sex (which may have been “assigned” after birth by doctors)? Should their treatment be covered? Do you believe that they are legitimately transgender, or are they lying/mistaken/suffering from a psych disease?
Maybe one day we’ll know enough about the human brain to determine if transgender people’s brains actually resemble the brains of the gender they identify as (rather than the biological sex they’re born with), but until then, we determine this based on talking to people and researching people’s behavior. That’s how we learn about homosexuality, sexuality in general, and gender identity.
There’s no evidence that being transgender can be treated, any more than being gay can be treated, unlike body dysmorphia.
The difference between gay men, whether they are effeminate or masculine, and transwomen, is that gay men are happy and comfortable being men with male bodies, and transwomen are not. The same goes for lesbians and transmen. Further, some transwomen are attracted to women (and some transmen are attracted to men)! Did you know this, or did you think that all transwomen were attracted to men (and vice versa for transmen)?
Can you at least accept that this description of the condition of transgender is at least possible? Is your certainty so strong that you’re unwilling to consider that you might be wrong?
I’ve reached the conclusion as a straight guy, that all this stuff is none of my business. You want to be a guy, you want to be a girl, fine, whatever. Live and let live, you know?
So, personally, I think if that were to happen to me, I would adapt. It would take a while. Heck, I was clumsy throughout both pregnancies, and tended to bump into things because my body image didn’t match my actual body.
That being said, not everyone is like me. I know some trans people, and they are really unhappy being identified as the wrong sex, despite having grown up that way. Even if it is a subset of body dysmorphia (and I don’t think it is, since it is often more about social interactions than about the body itself) what practical difference does that make? Here we have a class of people who are miserable and unhappy in their own skins, and we can largely solve that problem by treating them as their preferred gender. Why is that a bad solution?
A common misconception, repeated by the OP, is that transgender is the same (or closely related) as sexual preference. It is absolutely not – transgender is about gender identity, not sexual attraction or preference. There are people born with male bodies that are attracted to women, but whose gender identity is female – these are transwomen who are attracted to women. And there are people born with female bodies that are attracted to men, but whose gender identity is male – these are transmen, attracted to men. And, of course, there are people born with intersex conditions who are attracted to either (or both) sexes.
Are you currently required to go out with any women you don’t find attractive because they belong to some discriminated against subgroup, all in the name of “equality”?
Have you considered the possibility that you’re rationalizing your own emotional response to transwomen, and completely disregarding the very real emotional state of a lot of other people?
You’re telling me that if someone with said penis decides to have a doctor take a scalpel to it, and starts taking massive doses of hormone supplements to do a better job of living like a woman, you’re going to doubt that person’s sincerity?
The sex-change operation isn’t proof that someone is serious?
Some transgender women prefer sex with women; gay men, as a rule, don’t.
What’s to think? It’s a basic human rights issue, like gay rights or anything else about which many conservatives and evangelicals seem inexplicably offended and bothered.
The real question is why you’re so worked up about it that you derailed your own thread in Elections and are now pontificating about it here. What is the moral basis of being all worked up about something that shouldn’t affect you in any way?
So you keep saying. Yet the evidence says otherwise, namely the fact that every single thing I have ever seen you post has been far to the right of center, often preceded by the same claim of being a liberal. If you actually want to be a liberal maybe you should listen to some of the things that liberals are telling you.
Pretty much this. If only more people subscribed to that philosophy, the world would be a better place.
Gender identity is what gender you feel yourself to be.
Sexual orientation is what gender you are sexually attracted to.
And cross-dressing or transvestism has to do with what gender you dress like (I am aware that there are some who make distinctions between the two terms but I’m keeping it simple here).
They are distinct things. Note that:
[ul]
[li]Gay men are not men that want to be women; they’re men who are sexually attracted to men. Lesbians do not feel themselves to be men, no matter how masculine some may act or appear to be; they’re women who consider themselves to be women but are sexually attracted to other women. [/li][li]Many cross-dressers are neither gay nor transgender (see for example British sculptor Grayson Perry who often appears in public in feminine attire yet is a man happily married to a woman). For some it is a sexual fetish; for others, merely a style of dressing with which they feel most comfortable.[*]Transgender people may be gay, straight or bi regardless of their own gender identity (and regardless of whether they have transitioned or not). [/li][li]Some homosexuals and transgender people cross-dress; most do not. [/li][/ul]
If you want to have a conversation about this, understanding the difference between these three categories is a good place to start.
Once you’ve got that down, please read Una Persson’s “Ask the Transexual Woman” thread in which she answers a lot of very personal questions, some of which may mirror your own questions on the subject.
Finally, you might want to consider where the harm is actually occurring. Personally I find cross-dressing a bit weird, the idea of gay sex revolting and the idea of feeling like a women utterly alien. I manage this by not doing any of those things, but there’s no reason for me to stop others from doing them because frankly I don’t have a right not to be mildly squicked out by what other people who aren’t harming anyone else do.
Conversely, a lot of the current wave of anti-trans legislation will actively harm transgender people. It will increase assaults, rapes, false arrests and harassment of people whose only crime is having to pee. Which is what liberals are trying to prevent.
But what about the DSM 5 and all of the studies on transgender people…
OK, so what you’re saying is that you’ve decided that you’re going to ignore any actual medical studies or changes to diagnostic criteria by calling them political? So this isn’t really for the ‘debate’ part of great debates, but is here because you’re witnessing about personal beliefs not based in fact?
So if this is just witnessing, I’ll stop arguing facts, and just ask why is it so important to you to hurt trans people? Why does people recieving medical treatment that actually works and quietly going about their lives affect you to such a degree that you are angry about it and want to hurt them? Civil rights have always been a ‘political issue’, how does civil rights as a ‘political issue’ invalidate any research that happens to align with treating people as humans?
If you believe this, then why don’t you believe that a person who wants to dress like a woman is biologically wired differently? Why don’t you believe that a person who believes they are a woman in a man’s body or vice versa are biologically wired differently?
Development toward a masculine or feminine appearance only begins with the combination of XX and XY. The Y chromosome has a gene called SRY that influences the expression of genes carried by both males and females in the non-sex chromosomes (the autosomes). These genes in turn influence the development of the testes which release testosterone. Spikes of testosterone prenatally and at puberty are important in masculinizing the brain and behavior. This biological mechanism works marvelously well so that knowing whether a person is XX or XY (or XXY, XYY, or XO) is very predictive of one’s outward appearance and biases in behavior. But it’s biology so it isn’t perfect: There is variation from what we naively might expect to be a well-integrated system of development from early during gestation to adult.
As a result we see a lot of variation in the degree to which one behaves in a spectrum of masculine to feminine behaviors. This recognition that the genetic and hormonal aspects of sex are not necessarily predictive of behavior is why it makes sense to speak of sex and gender separately. The most extreme forms of this developmental differentiation: transgender people, transvestite people, homosexual people are, to me, just variations on the exact same theme that led to me. Instead of forcing them to accommodate a highly stratified social environment along gender lines, I prefer to view all this gender and sexual orientation differentiation as an opportunity to free people up to be more like what they really are - to be what we are like without external threats from society to force us to act a certain way.
DerekMichaels00, you have a strong enough opinion on this topic that you are compelled to write about it on this message board at least twice that I know of and politician’s responses to this phenomenon matter to you. Yet you display, seemingly proudly, the strongest ignorance on the topic. Your refutations are nothing more than hand-waving.
Since it is extremely doubtful that transgendered people and people who like to dress as women have ever hurt you in any way shape or form, then why don’t you just bow out of the discussion in all aspects of your life? I think it would be quite noble of you to basically admit they aren’t harming you, you don’t believe these people and the millions of person hours of medical research that has gone into the topic, and you prefer to know nothing about it. Just admit that them attaining a better life for themselves, in their perception, isn’t causing you any problems at all. Let it go and embrace the freedom to express oneself without physically harming others.
There is a well-documented medical condition called “complete androgen insensitivity syndrome.” Cite.
The condition causes the cells of the body, as it develops in the womb, to be resistant or immune to androgens. Androgenic hormones cause the development of male genitals in an XY person, but a person with CAIS does not develop masculinized male genitals, and indeed typically develops outwardly female genitals.
Such a person may not even be aware of the condition growing up: born looking like a girl, and growing up looking like a girl, the first sign of any unusual condition might be the lack of any menstrual cycle beginning.
But the person clearly has a Y chromosone.
Is this person a man or a woman, in your view?
If you have trouble answering that question, I invite you to consider that it’s because the basic premise: that a man or a woman is something can be determined by body alone – is fatally flawed. It’s clearly flawed in this instance. So if you accept that there are circumstances in which we can agree that an individual is a woman, even though she has an XY chromosone pair, then what is the principled basis for your contrary position?
My opinion is that I’m fine with it. Somebody with a random set of sexual chromosomes feels like they should have had another set? Fine by me and good luck with their struggle. I’m not offended by that. Why should I?
That’s what I don’t get. People feeling like they have a different gender or that the definition of gender is too constrictive shouldn’t have any affect on your life, or impinge your freedom to be whoever you want to be. Why is it such a problem to you?