It’s not as straightforward as XX vs. XY. There are mosaics and chimeras who have both XY and XX cells. There’s androgen insensitivity. Different types of aneuploidy, e.g. XXY, XXYY. These people were dealt a shit hand.
What’s curious to me (and where the controversy always explodes) are XY males who say they’re really women. They seem to conflate sex with gender and think it should be the same. They say they feel like a woman, but the descriptions are stereotypes of femininity in a specific time and place, e.g. liking dolls as a kid, liking pink, wanting to wear a dress, etc. This is where tomboys and butches say they never felt any of that and they’re pretty sure they’re women too, thank you very much. Or the XY will say he’s more nurturing than other males. Great, be a teacher, nurse, whatever. Or maybe he likes dudes. Ain’t nothing wrong with being gay. Are these compelling reasons to ask a surgeon to cut off your penis? The psychology seems to be like anorexia sufferers who self harm to chase an impossible goal. There has to be a better way to help these people.
The most outspoken anti-trans diatribes I’ve ever seen aren’t from religious conservatives but from rad fem blogs. They hate the idea of their female spaces being invaded by men masquerading as women, especially politically. They see them as enemy saboteurs. Y chromosomes need not apply.
In these debates it seems like XX female-to-male is almost never brought up. Intersex or XY assigned female at birth transitioning to male is taken for granted, but otherwise normal XX? Its rarity is one explanation, but it doesn’t seem to garner the same outrage either. As members of the patriarchy shouldn’t we be angry these women are appropriating our privilege? Oh well.
Can you give an example of something you would or feel you might be asked to “play along with”? I could understand if you didn’t want to go to a bridal shower. I wouldn’t understand if you didn’t want to call them by their chosen name.
It is bigotry of a sort, but in this case I’d say how you treat other people is probably the most important thing as far as society is concerned. You don’t have to like people or agree with them but you do have to show them respect and consideration. Sometimes that comes down to “playing along”, but these sorts of social customs and white lies and the like are part of what makes modern society possible. More and more we’re leaning towards “call transgender people by their preferred pronoun and name”. Are you OK with that?
As far as sexual intimate partners - if you find transgender to be a turn off you find it a turn off. It’s no different than not finding redheads or women taller than you attractive. Sexual preferences can be quite specific. As long as you’re not a total bastard towards people who might have an interest in you, but you yourself have no interest in yourself, no big deal.
Do you need to change your views? No, you don’t need to change them. Some people might prefer if you do, but it’s not necessary because we (supposedly) have free thought in this country. Nothing wrong with examining your views, either.
My brother-in-law still believes that blacks are not equal to whites and wants me to show him a modicum of respect by not asking him to play along with something that he doesn’t think is real in the same sense as I do.
I think he’s bigoted. What do you think?
Society is becoming more understanding of the complexities involved. As I posted in Una’s thread, even the socially conservative Japanese government recognizes that this is something very real.
Bigotry out of ignorance is probably less ugly than that out of hatred, but it’s still bigotry.
You don’t have to be willing to have sex with a trans person. You just need to ensure that you treat them like any other human beings to whom you’re not sexually attracted.* Which is to say, with respect and dignity. Don’t pretend they don’t exist. Hold the door open for them as you would everyone, be generally polite, err on the side of smiling and keeping unsolicited opinions to yourself.
Mr. K, chances are you have *already *met one (or several) trans people who can pass as their chosen gender. Never knowing they were born the opposite gender, you treated them the same way you would treat any other person. Does that bother you?
Wouldn’t you be angry if a sizeable chunk of the people you met insisted on calling you a woman because you were short, or had a small adam’s apple, or small hands, or happened to have a high-pitched voice, or didn’t like football (etc)?
Regardless of people like Shodan’s gut response to transexualism, lots of things are more important than your feelings. It is more important for a person who has been marginalized and felt uncomfortable their whole life to feel accepted than it is for someone like you to feel right. With all due respect, get over yourself. Do you realize that, if you treat trans people like shit, they may kill themselves? They faced different life challenges than you did. Why do you think you have the right to invalidate them?
*This doesn’t just apply to encounters with trans people, but encounters with fat people or ugly people or disfigured people or people of a different race. It’s really not that hard to maintain a basic level of respect for people, no matter what they look like–unless you’re an unsympathetic asshole.
I’m confused… would you or wouldn’t you have a problem addressing a transsexual person by their ‘new’ name and gender identity? And if a co-worker asked you politely and respectfully to address them as ‘her’ and ‘she’, would you refuse, or would you follow their polite request?
In general (from my understanding) trans people don’t care what you think about their genitals, or even their gender identity. They only care how you treat them. Treat them respectfully, and it doesn’t really matter what you think.
This is pretty good advice for anyone in any situation, pretty much… treat people with respect, and it doesn’t really matter what you think. It’s what you do that matters.
Does the ripened melon not taste of a different funk than that which attracts you to melon? I will tell you I have seen sight of Victoria’s Secret… the carnage lies somewhere beneath right on top of our surface. If man born of natural affinity of life to proceed upon it in order of approach meant to be carried out as a thriving for the speciies. if it is so corrupted upon and left in its negligence to be attended by aid of therapy and or false use of medications… i say to these trans- go… med yourself… .you ***ts
i suppose the answer in more clarity is no. they are the ones who should be feeling the negative approach to life… they chopped themselves up. bring the pamphlet.
I appreciate all the replies so far, it’s been an education and lots of food for though (as has the Ask the thread linked above), I’ll try and expand on my thinking if I can. I don’t want to come across as some out of touch Victorian retired colonel whose monocle pops out and dismisses the whole business as “You can put a saddle on a dog, but it’ll never be a horse by Jove!”
It isn’t like I go around all day thinking on this topic nor trying to convince others that my admittedly knee-jerk reaction is right. But when ones views are diametrically opposed to those of doctors and lawmakers you’ve got to wonder who is right and if you are justified in this opposition (as it seems, I am definitely not).
I think the limits of our medical technology when it comes to this issue is partly what causes me such confusion. As I said, even if we had the ability to make someone absolutely 100% biologically female or male as they wished I’d still have massive trouble accepting this person as what they appeared if I knew they’d been born the other gender, so you can imagine how tricky it is at the moment when vestiges of the birth gender remain. It just sort of short-circuits my thinking.
Like I said I don’t think that people should be changed back to what I think they ‘really’ are or anything of that nature, I’d use the name and pronoun they chose but all the while thinking they were the wrong sex. Consequently, I wouldn’t tell someone to leave a changing room room or whatever but it would just make me very uncomfortable (if I knew, it’s not like I go around asking).
This is what I feared, that even though I’m perfectly capable of the social mores that on a subconscious level I’ll give off a weird vibe to people, rather than just treating at face value and how they want to be treated. In other words, treating someone different because of what they are in a biological sense which has been the creed of bigots for centuries. Granted it’s in a minor way but my prejudice is still there - there cannot be two realities; either they are what they say or they aren’t.
If you meet someone who tells you they are rich, do they have to validate their personal history I wealth before you are willing to accept they are rich?
If someone tells you they are a Christian is there a set point on their history they must have been a Christian before you accept that they are one?
A Democrat? A librarian? A Tolkein fan?
Every day you take people’s word for it that they are who they say they are. If you have more than a passing relationship with them, you continue to believe them based on how they present themselves and act.
If a dude says he’s rich and you see him in a BMW every day, in a $1200 suit, eating $80 lunches and taking golf vacations, do you sit stirring knowing that at one point in his life he wasn’t?
Prolly not. As far as you’re concerned he’s a rich guy.
So if you met a woman who wore dresses everyday, had better hair and makeup than your wife, and a lovely rack…why do you sit stirring knowing that at some point on their lives they weren’t a woman?
People are who they say they are. Unless for some malicious reason they need to be exposed, it shouldn’t be on you to change your perception of them based on their past.
Oh, yes, the old “if you’re bigoted against bigots, then you’re a bigot too” argument.
Let me put it this way. There are two ways of addressing me: -
You can call me “she” as I have asked. This makes me feel like a human being, and I appreciate that you respect me enough to go along with my request. It has no effect on your life whatsoever.
You can ignore my request, and continue to call me “he”. This makes me feel like shit, and has a negative effect on my already-shaky confidence. I resent you for your lack of respect. It has no effect on your life whatsoever.
Can you understand that Option 1 is the most beneficial arrangement, at no cost to you?
I’ve been reading these boards for long enough to know that you’re considered somewhat of a troll. I’m sure that when you don’t have the anonymity of a computer screen to hide behind, you’re a decent person and treat others as human beings. But for the sake of my mental wellbeing, I’m leaving this thread now before things go any further.
I’m reading your OP as mostly being you not being sexually attracted to someone you know for a fact is transgendered, with no other real world applications. You will always think of them as the gender you originally knew them as in your head and aren’t attracted to them, but that is as far as it goes?
I don’t see how that is bigotry, you can’t help who you’re attracted to.
Depends on the situation, I’d bet. Do you really think if you met this guy: Loren Cameron (picture is SFW) and got to know him, interacted with him everyday, and then a year later he said, oh by the way, I’m FTM (he is), that you would suddenly start thinking of him as a woman? Really?
The thing you have to retrain your brain on is that “man” and “woman” are not two distinct categories of human that have zero overlap. I know we are trained tp think like this from birth, but it is not true. They are more like terms we give to a particular set of characteristics, that have endless room for overlap. And that gender transition is about a lot more than “the surgery”. And some trans people never have any, but can still live as their preferred gender with no issue. Not all trans women have big hands or a deep voice or are tall, and you might one day meet one and be her acquaintance and never know. And I’d bet you’ve met plenty of non-trans women who were deep voiced, or big handed, or tall and never even, for a second, wondered what sort of genitals they had.
I don’t think the OP is coming across as bigoted. I think he’s wrong, but that’s different.
For me, one of the essential components of bigotry is the assumption that ‘My opinion is objectively correct, and I demand that everyone else, including people much more crucially involved than me, conform to it.’ A bigot isn’t just someone who privately thinks of a trans woman as a guy - it’s someone who insists on calling her ‘him’, demands that she stay out of the women’s bathroom, and so on. The OP has made it clear that he would treat her as a woman, whether or not he was comfortable with it. In other words, while (he believes) he would think of her as a man, he wouldn’t try to impose that thought on her or anyone else.
Thought policing is dodgy as hell. And, even more than that, the world really needs people like the OP - people who are willing to accept that their own perceptions may not be the be-all and end-all, and who are willing to place respect towards others above those perceptions. That’s one of the main ways society has been (slowly) eroding other forms of bigotry: through people like this. Sexism and racism and homophobia aren’t being eroded solely because of people who truly believe from birth that all sexes, races and orientations are equal and deserve equal rights. Getting a critical mass of people to believe that is a slow, gradual process. Along the way to that, you also need the people who believe that, ‘Well, even though women really don’t belong in the workplace and gay sex is wrong, I’m going to treat my female colleagues and my gay neighbours with the same respect I give to everyone else, because that’s the decent thing to do.’ Those are the people who, when they get to know the female colleagues and the gay neighbours, start to realise: ‘Hang on, these are people. Individuals. Working and loving just like me and everyone else. And I’m having a harder and harder time thinking there’s anything wrong with that.’
Basically, the willingness to put respect for others’ rights above your own knee-jerk response is all too rare, it’s an essential step towards fighting bigotry on a society-wide level, and I have a hard time lumping it in with real bigotry. Also I think the OP’s knee-jerk response would change if he knew a few trans people.
OP, this reminds me of a lot of conversations I had years ago with various people who told me that they simply could never think of a gay guy as just a guy, because they knew that they would always be fundamentally aware of their gayness. And they also said that they didn’t know any gay people.
Once these people started realizing there were gay people around them, that there had been all the time, they found that holding on to that idea was harder. It’s hard not to see a gay guy as just a guy when he’s right there with you being just a guy. It’s hard to hold onto two conflicting ideas at once.
So, I think others are right when they say that if you knew some trans people (and you might without being aware of it) then you’d find that holding both “I will be polite and always refer to this person by their chosen name and pronoun and treat her as a woman” and “But this is a MAN!” to be too tiring. And thinking about their origin turns into a bore. You don’t meet people and constantly think about where they were born. It’s boring! Right now, on paper, you think that it would be in the forefront of your mind that the person you are talking to is trans, but it would slip to the back of your mind after a while, and then out of your mind entirely, because we just don’t dwell on these things, day-to-day. We’ve got other thinks to think.
And the language we use matters. Our brains may control what we say, but what we say also controls our brains. As we change our speech and refer to the former Paul as Pauline, Paul becomes Pauline. It becomes a habit in the thinking and, again, easier to say “she” in both what we say and what we think than to keep two separate pronouns in play.
I’m not quite certain where ZipperJJ came from, but whatever they write seems worth studying. My first suggestion is to meditate on their post from 10:31 PM Saturday. Most of the coolest things I was thinking of saying are already in there, and more crisply laid out than I could have done anyway, and there’s more than I thought of too.
Second suggestion: consider that you are putting way too much emphasis on birth-assigned gender as the “real” gender. How do you even know what gender was assigned at birth anyway? Consider that you should put way more emphasis on what gender somebody tells you they have. Really, what kind of standing do you have to argue with them? Can you imagine somebody taking issue with what you say your own gender is?
Third suggestion: don’t mix together two very separate concepts, namely, (1) whether you want to have sex with somebody, and (2) whether they are OK or defective. Whether you want to have sex with somebody is a property of you, not them. For something like 99.9999999% of human beings, whether you want to have sex with them is a total non issue. And, yes, I thought about the number and counted the nines.
First of all, you’re coming dangerously close to insults here. Secondly, calling or implying another person is a troll is against the rules in this forum, so don’t make a post like the second one again unless you’re in the Pit.
It’s good to see the moderators directly attacking the victim in this case. I can’t wait to see what forms of bigotry and hatred you guys stand up for next, in a thread where somebody already said they weren’t posting again because they were tired of being belittled and insulted.
