Well, today someone referred to me as “Angry Spice”. I think I like that one best.
Lighten up, that was humour.
Of course it’s different. But the real question is why does it matter to you? No two “born women” have exactly the same life experiences. No two anybody have the exact same life experiences. That doesn’t mean we can’t try to understand each other. Why insist on dividing?
Wait, just hold the phone a minute! As far as I ever knew, Eve has XX chromosomes! Is that not the case?
You realize that you are now officially gay, right?
Alright, so on terms of gender, can someone please explain how many there actually are? Just two, male and female, although apparently you can just change which one you are whenever you please/because you thought you were different from the others from a young age/because of some sort of mixup at birth? What’s up here? I’m not really grasping this at all. Maybe a chart would help. I just got lost when someone said XY and XX chromosomes didn’t necessarily indicate gender, 'cuz I was taught in school that’s that what the case in fact was.
I am not following this.
I thought someone said or implied that Eve was a post-operative transsexual.
It doesn’t have to be any of my business, but I welcomed KellyM’s definitions of terms as something I should have gotten clarified way earlier in this thread, and now I am confused again.
To clarify - my understanding is that Eddie Araujo and Brandon Teena were transsexuals, or transgendered people by KellyM’s definitions - people with XY chromosomes who believed themselves to be women, and who dressed and/or acted “like women”. (I put the phrase in quotes, because I think the idea that women necessarily dress or act a certain way is a contentious one).
My comments about people suffering from gender confusion, and who are engaged in (in my view) deception, applies only to pre-op transsexuals and transgendered persons as previously defined. Not intersexuals. That is a different matter, not involving (in my view) any form of deception or self-deception.
Larry Mudd - yours is another post deserving of a more careful read than I have the time to give it. My superficial skim of it is hardly enough to justify a response, other than it seems that you are saying that genes+genitals=gender is a false notion, because it is common sense, and common sense is often wrong.
Perhaps it is. But we only know this when evidence to contradict it shows up.
Yes, there are such things as meteors. But we only know this because meteorites have been observed. Men do not have to have beards. But this is only common in cultures who shave.
In the case of gender, the evidence that has shown up has confirmed common sense, not contradicted it. Nobody had any clue about genes or chromosomes back when all men had beards, but beards were a short hand way of identifying males. If you were able to do a genetic analysis of someone with a beard, they would have turned up XY. Genetic analysis, in other words, confirmed the common sense notion that beards=male.
For your point to be valid, there would have to be some evidence that people who were genetically XY but who felt themselves to be women, were describing some objective reality. Which is why I wish I could see DocCathode’s study for myself.
Without something like that, transgendered persons are asking us to simply take their word for it that they are “really” women, although there is no objective reason to overrule the genetic evidence (and physical genitalia) and classify them as women.
Unless my superfical read of your post missed the point completely, as is entirely possible.
Polycarp, I haven’t forgotten your post. As soon as I can steal another few minutes, I want to re-read and respond.
Regards,
Shodan
Then someone better alert my grandmother that her disconcerting little 'stache and goatee means she’s actually a man.
I see that it was an ambiguous statement. I should have said something more along the lines of the following:
I always equated a transgendered individual to a hermaphrodite. They have the physical sexual characteristics of gender A but the entire mental and emotional makeup of gender B. **The equating of the transgendered individual to a hermaphrodite is because they both have qualities of both genders. **
PS. I’ll shut up now and let the real experts talk. You go Girls!
I’d say “brain makeup” rather than “mental and emotional makeup” myself. Speaking as a woman (and a biological woman with female gender at that) with a personality that’s a long way from the “girlie girl” end of the bell curve, I’d be wary of making a statement that’s open to being interpreted as “emotional makeup within a gender is homogenous”
It would be a mistake to confuse the seat of gender identity in the brain with the whole of the rest of the personality. When we think about our gender identity, we don’t run down a laundry list of personality traits. We just know.
As our dearest Eve herself put it:
“I AM a lady. But I was raised to be a gentlemen.”
Eve is probably one of the most ladylike women I know. Case closed.
This is exactly where it all falls apart for me. Maybe it’s just not known yet, but what’s going on differently in the brain? As you say, there is a huge spectrum of emotional and personality traits across all people, with society structuring what is stereotypical “male” or “female”. I “just know” I am a woman because I have female body parts; emotionally I have things in common with a variety of other people.
If I have this right, female- or maleness is not determined by:
- chromosomes
- genitals
- personality or emotional traits
- sexual preference/orientation
- taste (for clothing, appearance, etc.)
So what the heck do “male” or “female” mean anyway?
What we have here is a Clintonesque question – what does “is” mean, anyway?
What is a person? Is he or she the body, some interior inhabitant of that body, the combination, or what?
Is a person a man or woman because he/she considers himself/herself to be a man or woman? Is it genetic? Is it phenotypical? Is it some combination of these? How do you concur on an answer?
Earlier in the thread somebody quoted the homely Lincoln line about “if you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does that dog have” – to which Lincoln pointed out that the answer is “four – calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
But if one performs neurosurgery on that dog so that he runs on three legs and wags his left hind leg when he’s happy, the question then becomes how many legs does that dog think he has?
I submit that the only reasonable answer to these questions for a healthy human being is to grant to persons who consider themselves transsexuals the right to call themselves what they consider themselves to be, regardless of whether hormonal treatment or surgery has been undertaken.
Kelly, thanks for correcting my misuse of “transsexual” – I was inadvertently mistaking that term for “intersexual” and did know the distinction. However, your clarification confuses me in one way:
I’m clear on the idea of transsexuality, but a bit mystified as to how “transgender” makes a distinction from “transsexual.” A couple of examples of people who are one but not the other would probably clear it up, but your definitions, while clear, don’t “fit” anything in my mind where I can see the “oh, yeah, he/she is A but not B” distinction that you’re clearly making.
Now I THINK I understand, but it’s still a LOT to wrap your brain around.
However, what if, someday, we could do body transplants and stuff like that?
There’d be a thread in Great Debates explaining how they were immoral, being against God’s will. And december would make it clear that the Democrats were behind it. 
**
Brandon Teena did not have XY chromosomes. Brandon Teena did not believe himself to be a woman. Brandon Teena did not dress or act like a woman. Brandon Teena had XX chromosomes but identified, dressed, and behaved as a man. The publicity surrounding his brutal murder and the success of the documentary The Brandon Teena Story and the fictionalized film Boys Don’t Cry have made Brandon Teena posthumously one of the most famous transgendered Americans, and his story has been told in some detail in this very thread. I don’t see how you can expect anyone to take your views on this matter seriously if you can’t even be bothered to pay attention to the most basic facts involved.
**
Wrong. Genetics has told us nothing about gender because gender is not a biological concept.
You are confusing sex and gender. Sex is a biological concept, gender is a behavioral/cultural/psychological concept. It is usually possible to place an individual neatly into a “male” or “female” sexual category based on genetics and outward physical appearance, but this is not always the case. An individual’s gender identity (“masculine” or “feminine”) usually corresponds to that individual’s physical sex as determined by chromosomes/genitals, but this is not always the case.
There may be some biological basis for gender identity, but whatever physical factors may be involved they are clearly not limited to gentials/chromosomes. While thoughts like “a man is a person with a penis/XY chromosomes” and “a woman is a person with a vagina/XX chromosomes” may seem like common sense, a simple analysis of day-to-day human behavior should be enough to show that people regularly interact as men and women without their genitals or chromosomes ever coming into it. Everyone who knows me knows that I am a woman without having to give me a pelvic exam or a blood test. I must possess some traits other than my gentials/chromosomes that signal “woman” to other people. Whatever those traits are, it doesn’t seem hard to imagine that they might also be possessed by some people who do not have gentials/chromosomes like mine.
I will be honest here and say that I do not understand transsexualism on a personal level. I can well understand that someone may not feel that they fit into the gender role associated with their physical sex, or into any gender role at all, but an idea like “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” is completely foreign to me. But many people have many experiences that I cannot relate to on a personal level. This does not mean that they are not real.
Actually, by “femaleness and maleness”, I did mean gender as opposed to sex. And I can understand intellectually that it means something other than biological indicators. But what does it mean? People probably know you’re a woman because you physically look like a woman, have a higher voice, etc. An extremely “masculine” (in a traditional sense, vaild or not) woman is still considered a woman and in most cases considers herself a woman. Traits are labelled masculine or feminine by society; this is then an intrinsic natural thing rather than society’s categorizations?
And I am really sick of “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” running through my head–darn Shania Twain and her catchy tunes
Rendering the distinctions man and woman meaningless, so what are we even talking about? Does it matter? (I know, yes, as long as people are getting killed over it.)
Do you believe that gay people are actually gay, instead of being heterosexual? If you do I would like to know your reasoning behind this.
There is much more going on than people giving their word that they are a certain gender. For example the HBIGDA’s Standard of Care exists. It exists because of gay men who decided that the only Christan thing to do was to become women. After getting surgery they went on to realise that they were still men and often committed suicide.
An excellent question. These terms have a concrete relationship with regard to sexual reproduction, and are perfectly-suited to describing differences between people in direct relation to sexual reproduction. We only get into difficulty when we extend their use beyond what is practical.
We have a lot of cultural associations attached to “male” and “female” which have nothing to do with the regenerative process, which can cause us to see things that aren’t there.
From elsewhere in LTR:
Gender identity seems, when examined closely, to be a spectrum, rather than a simple binary value. We have a hard time describing transgendered people, because of our unconscious tendency to recognize only two genders. We can clearly see that something is different, but in order to talk about someone who is transexual, we have to first assign them to the closest available category, and then add modifications: “Chris is a man, who feels like a woman.” It’s hard to comprehend a statement like this without attributing the difference to mere whimsy on the part of the hypothetical Chris. Chris can’t really talk about who she is without appearing to make contradictions. Not her fault – limitations of language.