saying the killing was justified. You’ve said the killers had reason to be upset, but that their actions were wrong.
I am accusing you of ignorance and a total lack of empathy on transgendered issues.
You have said
**
So if KellyM or Eve are not XX and have not had genital surgery yet, they’re men?
Note that I did not say still men. As Kelly has said many times, she was never a man.
When a pre-op ftm tells some one that they are a woman, they are not practicing deception. A penis no more makes them men, than wheels would make me a bus.
There was a study that found ftm transexuals did have brains that were more male than female. Nature magazine has the study on the web. But only subscribers can get in. I'll go cite hunting again.
Doc, one of the lessons it’s been hardest for me to learn on this board, and I offer it to you, is: Don’t read into posts what people did not say in them.
Shodan did not make a value judgment on the sex involved here, which I am inferring is what you meant by “Gwen’s behavior was aberrant and wrong.” (Pray correct me if I am making false assumptions about what you meant.) He said that two things were wrong:
Major offense: Three (or perhaps four) boys killed someone because “he was a boy dressed as a girl” who had misled them into having sex with him.
Minor offense: “Boy dresses as girl in order to have sex with other boys who would not have sex with him as a boy.”
As I said above, I think a thread that clearly addresses what is going on in the head of a transsexual individual and who he/she “really” is, is in order, and in GD rather than the Pit.
However, the moral judgments that Shodan made were for murder and willful misrepresentation of oneself. The idea that Eddie really was a girl, in interior perception of identity, despite having a boy’s body, is where there is a difference of opinion; as I understand Shodan, his assertion is that Eddie was a boy who was confused about his sexuality and pretended to be Gwen/Lida, and hence is guilty of misrepresentation. The idea that he might have represented himself as “really Gwen (or Lida) but still with a boy’s body” would have obviated the second critical comment.
It’s worth noting that the parallel story on the Pizza Parlor, copied from a news source as a story on which people may comment, refers to a “Cross dresser murdered…” – failing utterly to comprehend the phenomenon of transsexual identity.
And, with my usual talent for zeroing in on an issue I particularly want to post on, Shodan, I did neglect to state that I read and understood your point that whatever Gwen/Eddie/Lida may have done in no way excuses what was done to her/him.
I think that people are justified in having been offended by this assertion.
I don’t wear men’s clothes in order to have sex with women, I wear men’s clothes because that’s what feels natural and comfortable for me. I’m sure that Araujo’s motivation for selecting a wardrobe are along parallel lines. Why assume an intent to deceive?
If the accused could see past the end of the peckers, they would have been able to see the person that they were about to become intimate with.
If someone isn’t in line with your expectations, it’s not necessarily because they’re being deceptive.
I think we need to look at other cultures, past and present, that recognize(d) the variety of sexual orientations beyond an overly simplified one-dimensional vector. How did they react when misunderstandings like this took place? A shrug and move on.
Not really. For example it would be suicidal to openly proclaim you are gay in Iraq. The main difference is that being gay/black/female isin’t currently looked down upon as much as being transgendered.
The problem here is that we are trying to use the exact same word to describe people that are not exactly the same as each other. This, surprisingly enough, causes no end of confusion.
My mother is a woman. She was born with XX chromosomes, and bore 4 children. My father is a man, has XY chromosomes and fathered 4 children.
KellyM shares a significant similarity to my father (a man), in that she has XY chromosomes and can sire children. My mother has none of this, but we are all supposed to the same word “woman” to describe my mom and Kelly, when there are clear and important differences.
Personally, I don’t want to date (or have sex with) someone who has XY chromosomes. Without getting ridiculously blunt about it how is a person to know? Apparently, even asking “Are you a woman?” isn’t good enough. I have to ask “Were you born with XX chromosomes?” or “Do you now, or have you ever had, a penis?”
If you are a transgendered person, you have to know that confusion can arise, and that such confusion has the potential to make otherwise reasonable people very upset.
No, what I was saying was that other people’s sexual behavior was none of my business unless it impacted other people. Which is why I asked, what makes this any of my business?
You didn’t miss a link, you missed a word. That word being “If”. It is a hypothetical situation. IF s/he had done what you describe, it would have been different.
As far as the men being unknowing, I assumed the OP’s description of taking him/her into the bathroom and determining gender was a necessary precondition for their knowing his/her gender. If they already knew, why check?
If you mean the Puccini opera, yes. She was a woman.
As far as what type of sex it was, I think it would be safe to assume they did not have vaginal intercourse, given that nobody involved actually had a vagina. I suppose it could have been anal, but that would make the true gender of the participants somewhat harder to conceal. In any case, I don’t see that it matters all that much. I severely doubt that those who beat Araujo to death would have been any more partial to being masturbated by a male any more than any other form of sexual activity.
More of the same.
I’ll assume you don’t need cites on X and Y chromosomes, and their role in assigning gender.
That s/he was a teen-ager is in the OP. That s/he presented as a woman is there as well. So is the fact that s/he had had sexual relations with his/her attackers, which is their motivation. That s/he was acting dumb is my own interpretation.
Since a simple visual examination sufficed to determine that Gwen/Eddie was male, I think we can assume that s/he did not suffer from ambiguous genitalia. Or are you assuming that all transvestites are genetically anomalous? If so, I will ask for a cite in return.
I can’t see why that would be any of my business. But if you are asking me, yes.
In what sense is a person with male genitals and male chromosomes not a male?
It is reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s riddle - “How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg?”
The answer is, four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so. Calling a person who is male by every standard a female doesn’t make him so.
Eddie Araujo was a guy. The fact that s/he didn’t want this to be so doesn’t change the fact that it was so. As long as it was a matter between him/her and consenting partners, no harm was done. When deception entered the picture, it was.
Not enough to justify murder, if repeating something for the half-dozenth time will do any good. But it was wrong nonetheless.
Consider, for a moment, that the categories male and female (or, if you prefer, man and woman) are not based on genetalia, but are arbitrarily assigned by a physician at the birth of a child: this child is a girl, that child is a boy. Each child is then raised with that as their reality; their chromosonal makeup, and their genetalia, have nothing to do with their “gender” - it is, instead, a cultural assign to make interacting with that person easier.
There are a number of arguements (and no, I don’t have cites with me at work; I’ll have to look up Kate Borlund’s website when I’m at home) that indicate that gender may very well be a cultural designation rather than an inherent trait in a person.
As such, Kelly was never “male” - instead, the physician who attended her birth erroneously gave her that cultural assign based on her genetalia, which in fact has (have?) nothing to do with her gender. Similarly, my great-aunt’s son (who is a FTM) was misassigned. Genetalia is one of the more obvious indicators of this cultural assign we call gender, but has nothing to do with how a person self-identifies.
And now that I’ve muddied the waters completely, I’ll slink back out of the thread.
This is where things become difficult for me to work out in my mind. Because I don’t disagree that some people feel from the time they’re kids that they’re in the wrong body, and at the same time, I think that there is something different in growing up with one set of parts vs. the other.
It’s hard for me to understand because, though KellyM has said that she was never a man, she didn’t grow up with the same physical experiences that I did having been born in a female body. I’m not attempting to say that TS people are lying, so I hope nobody gets that impression, I’m merely attempting to wrap my brain around not feeling like my experiences of growing up, hitting puberty, having been the first girl in my fifth grade class to get her period, having to worry about things like ovarian cancer and ‘red leakage’ in middle school are somehow called unimportant or irrelevant to being a woman.
These are things that someone who had a penis will never understand firsthand, but things that seem pretty important ‘girl stuff’ when growing up and when getting older. My mom had a hysterectomy because of uterine and cervical cancer, but my friend who is MTF never has to worry about tumors in the uterus because she doesn’t have one.
So, if someone can explain to me why they feel biology is irrelevant, please do. I can’t guarantee that I’ll feel the same way, because my biology is really relevant to me, but I will listen with open mind.
Sterra, I’d be a person who lacks the understanding of what it’s like to grow up female.
Much like right now, I’m a person who totally lacks the understanding of what it’s like to grow up male. I’ve never had a nocturnal emission, never gotten an erection in school and been embarassed by it, never will have to think about testicular cancer, never have to get a prostate exam. And if I had sex-reassignment surgery tomorrow, I’d still never know what any of that from firsthand experience.
I’d lack some of personal understanding that comes with having been born male, much like I’d lack that same understanding if I’d been born without ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, etc.
catsix, I was told by several assholes that I would never be a real woman unless I got pregnant and raised a child. Your position is not all that far from theirs and reminds me of someone talking about someone being “black enough.”
If your parents had decided to raise you as a boy and your body had not changed, your experience would be far different, do you really think that could have made you a boy? What if they had surgery on you to make your genitals look like a boy? Would that make you a real boy? John Money found out the hard way that it is not so easy to make someone switch sexes.
I accepted Kelly as a woman from the start, but there have been experiences, like making love to her the first time, that intensified the reality for me. It is difficult to understand how it could be, but with so many experiences, it is very easy to accept that it is.
I’m guessing you’ve never heard of androgen insensitivty syndrome. Women with AIS have the XY chromosome pattern, but due to an insensitivty to androgens (duh) they do not develop masculine genitals. To all outward appearances they are completely female, although they do not possess internal female reproductive organs. Many women with AIS are quite beautiful. Nothing short of a blood test would tell you that they are genetically male.
There are many, many other conditions that may cause people to have a genetic pattern that is neither XX nor XY, or that may cause genitals that are not clearly “male” or “female”, or that may cause genitals that do not match up with the person’s chromosomes or brain structure. It is your right to say that you would never want to date these people, but I think that is narrowminded. It’s also difficult to put into practice – you may have already dated a woman who didn’t have XX chromosomes without even realizing it! :o
Ignoring the fact that you danced really closely to calling me an asshole, lee, I’m going to answer your questions.
Raised me ‘as a boy’ how? Dressing me in jeans and t-shirts, cutting my hair short, taking me fishing and hunting and referring to me as ‘My son Nina’?
They did those things, and I was still a girl. I am a girl.
Would I be the same as if I had been born with male genitals? No, because I wouldn’t have testes, I wouldn’t produce sperm, I wouldn’t have a prostate, I would not as I got older deal with things like prostate exams. It’d be a different life experience than someone who was born with those body parts.
What do you mean by ‘real boy’? Are you asking me if it would make me the same person I’d be had I been born male? I don’t think so. Because who a person is involves a sum of life experiences. And with different life experiences, it’s impossible to predict exactly what I’d be like, but the odds of that being exactly how I am right now are infinitely small.
catsix I guess you just have a rather unique view of what makes a person a girl. Do you apply this in real life and treat all women who never had a period as not really female?
Thanks for answering the question ‘Why do you believe what you do?’ so that I might gain some understanding of your perspective.
I asked because I actually wanted to try to understand why those who believe that biology isn’t relevant to who a person is do believe that.
Instead of anybody taking that as geniune interest, I got an insinuation that I’m an asshole and asked if I ‘treat anybody in life who hasn’t had a period as not female.’
Thanks. I’m sorry I actually listened to the reccomendation that I ask this here.
The point being, it doesn’t matter what I say, or what choice I make about how to consider you, until what you say or what choices you make, begins to impact someone else.
Why should I want to talk you into anything? The trouble comes when you, or Eddie Araujo, tries to talk me into something in order to get into my pants.
You want to think of yourself as a woman, or a man, or a hermaphrodite, or whatever, go ahead. Once you try to deceive someone else into giving up the same right to make choices about their sexuality, you have begun to practice deceit.
Entirely true. Good thing I never said anything of the sort, or I would have been mistaken.
In a word, horseshit.
In the enormously overwhelming majority of cases, “gender assignment” is no more arbitrary than the decision that total of fingers and toes should equal twenty. Nothing is assigned. It is the recognition of an obvious reality.
If it were in any sense arbitrary, the physician would never need to look. S/he could assign any gender identity at random, depending on whim, and, since it is an entirely arbitrary decision, the child would be male or female no matter how many ovaries he was born with.
This is like saying that I am the President of the United States, apart from the fact that I was never elected. Nonetheless, I am suffering from Presidental Confusion Syndrome, where society is depriving me of my rights by denying that I am really leader of the Free World, based on the purely arbitrary social fiction that I haven’t won any elections. Why can’t I ride in Air Force One? Why can’t I nuke Iran if the clerk who sold me my Slurpee at the 7-11 was really rude to me? Why don’t I get to sleep with Laura Bush?
If I wanted to dress up in a nice suit and sit at a cardboard desk in my basement and pretend to have conversations with Dick Cheney, I can’t see how I am really hurting anyone. But once I decide the Secret Service should be protecting me from al-Quida 24/7, and getting pissy if they refuse to do so, I have stepped over from harmless eccentricity into - well, call it confusion if it makes it sound better.
Play what games you like in your own head. You can be a woman or a man or the ambassador-at-large from the planet Zarkon for all I care. But my refusal to play along does not give you the right to forge credentials from Ming the Merciless and claim diplomatic immunity from traffic violations.
Sex under false pretences isn’t gender choice. It’s more like forced folie a deux.
None for me, thanks. And I would rather nobody tried to lie to me to force me into it.
Sterra, there are indeed “women” who do just that, and even women who don’t think you’re a “real woman” until you’ve had a child. People are amazingly good at finding ways to make themselves better than other people.
catsix, yes, I missed out on the stereotypical “girlhood moments”. Your comments reflect the “not woman enough for us” attitude that lead to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival demanding chromosome tests of some of its attendees to make sure they were “real womyn”. And your argument is exactly the one that exclusionists make for keeping transgenders out of women’s groups: they weren’t raised female, so they didn’t get the full female experience and shouldn’t be counted as true women.
So, if I’m not a man, and you won’t let me be a woman, what am I?