Sometimes the more inclusive college campuses will have a transgender day in their Pride Week lineup and all the segregated bathrooms become unisex. I’ve never noticed or heard of any problems happening because of it. Maybe all the nervous nellies just held it in for the day, I dunno.
Not trans, just open-minded, but thanks for this. I’ve had to scroll past much of this thread 'cos I’ve got a low tolerance for aggressive ignorance, but folks like you are fighting the good fight. Thanks! 
Still pissed nobody listened to and commented on that podcast. My expectations are high for Americans and I never learn my lesson.
So concerning the topic of wrong body:
Except for the unfortunate people who suffer that–who gives a shit?
It is what it is. People are born into wrong-sex bodies. Meanwhile, Amerika, the sky is falling…
And if anybody outed themselves here I didn’t notice. I save morbid curiosity for serial killers.
And I empathize with a gal who is looking for heels in size 14.
I have spoken.
I don’t think I’ve heard any trans jokes, actually. Are they typically funny, typically mean, or a roughly even mix? Or is this a whoosh?
Oh, and props to the people seriously answering the OP. Even if he had been being disingenuous (and I don’t think he was), it’s informative for the rest of us.
Hey, now. It’s not just Americans in this thread. You’re being ignored by an international audience.
Now now. It isn’t a podcast about me.
I listened, and I was interested in the different ways the parents decided to deal with the emerging gender awareness being exhibited in the behavior of their children. I have worked with children, and played as a child with children who were bullied for being more like a boy-as a girl, and more like a girl-as a boy. Also I haver dear friends who have lived as one sex, gone through transition, and come out of it feeling right in their own skin.
I agreed with the parents who decided to allow their child to be herself, and IMO, the other child who was forced to be socially acceptable, could ultimately repress, and possibly sneak and hide the truth, until it comes out later in life.
Oh, and thanks for sharing.
It’s more than 20 minutes long. Most people are not going to be willing to take a break from their SDMB reading to listen to a podcast that long, especially since you didn’t bother to provide much description about what it was or why anyone else would be interested in it.
For anyone who is curious but doesn’t have time to listen to the *All Things Considered *story “Two Families Grapple with Sons’ Gender Identity: Psychologists Take Radically Different Approaches In Therapy”, a transcript is available here: Two Families Grapple with Sons' Gender Identity : NPR
It must have been awfully disappointing to realize that when you issue a command to a bunch of strangers over the Internet they won’t necessarily obey within a 24 hour period. I doubt this behavior is limited to Americans, though.
Wow. Not sure that vitriol is really necessary. I listened, but was reading SDMB at the same time, so it didn’t get my full attention.
Thanks very much for that. It let me catch the bits I missed without going back through twenty minutes.
Except, of course, things that can be statistically determined don’t always apply to every individual. (I mean, if you believed in actual-factual science, which you clearly don’t, since you’re making this obviously invalid argument . . . )
Amazingly, legal protection exists for black people, even though there’s no way to prove from brain scans whether a person is white or black. And it turns out there’s no special cephalic proof that shows a person’s religion. Hell, even if we limit ourselves to cisgender men and women, the difference is only statistical; it can’t necessarily be demonstrated on any single individual person.
So we can obviously toss this line of argumentation entirely. You can’t actually prove anything from brain scans; the best you can do is demonstrate statistical differences. Except, of course, you personally can’t demonstrate anything at all from any number of brain scans, as evidenced by the fact that you haven’t even tried.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
At any rate, this has turned into a hijack, so I’ll end on that note. Lecture away on the proper etiquette!
[/QUOTE]
That’s a pretty sad sort of non-response to a valid point.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
2. Again, if I asked a biologist to sex two individuals of the species canis lupus familiaris they would not even look at the brains of the animal to do that, because it is unnecessary. Mammalian gender is not defined by brain structure.
[/QUOTE]
Demonstrate for the class that biologists, as a rule, reject transgenderism in humans.
Or else you’re just blowing smoke. (For observers: he is just blowing smoke; he will never present an actual scientific argument to support his point, because there isn’t one.)
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
Again, if I give a biologist a bitch and a dog, how is it going to sex them? Is a Ph.D. biologist going to hem and haw or is he going to say the dog with a vagina, ovaries, and mammary glands is a female and the dog with testes and a penis a male?
[/QUOTE]
Unless there is a biologist who can’t tell people apart from dogs, this is a non-argument. If there is a biologist who can’t make that distinction, I would opine, personally, that their opinion is probably not reliable.
What are these female and male brain differences that can’t be detected without an autopsy? There are documented differences in, for example size of the corpus callosum and differences in brain activation during various activities. But obviously these aren’t the differences that Miller and Broomstick are talking about, since they can be detected in living people.
The study I usually see referred to is “A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality” in Nature, 378: 68-70 (1995) by By J.-N. Zhou, M.A. Hofman, L.J. Gooren and D.F. Swaab. One of the brain structures highlighted in the study is the central portion of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis in the hypothalamus. With present technology, this can’t be examined closely enough in a living body to distinguish the genders, it’s quite small, but it’s something like 2.5 times bigger in males and transmen than in females and transwomen. No intermediate examples had been found at the time of the study.
Unfortunately, the on-line link I used to use for posts like this is no longer working, but there should be enough information on the article in the first paragraph of this post to allow someone to look it up on their on.
Indeed, some species have the ability to transform between genders, or are both genders at once, or can engage in both pathenogenesis and sexual reproduction. It doesn’t mean that there is an absolute parallel between them and us any more than there is between ourselves and dogs. Transgendered brains might be a unique part of our biology.
So, can I then assume that the more obvious distinctions I mentioned don’t show a link between natural born women and transwomen?
Not a whoosh. I hear people quite often say things like, “That girl looks like a tranny.” Or something like that.
You didn’t get what I was saying (or misinterpreted the first half of my post because you didn’t read the second half). I didn’t disagree with what you said in any way. I’m agreeing, and adding that the ‘cure’ presumably tells you something about what the problem is or isn’t.
Of course like cures like to some degree. Say I show up at the doctor with a set of symptoms that he thinks are eczema, and none of the eczema treatments work, but antidepressants cure the symptoms completely. Then not only are antidepressants the best cure, but there’s a good chance that the whole thing was psychosomatic to begin with.
In the same way, if treatments for mental illness don’t ‘cure’ transgender people, but fixing the body/mind mismatch does - then not only is transitioning the best treatment, but that seems to imply that the original problem was never a mental illness, but a body/mind mismatch.
Well it might be handy to know if they turn up as John/Jane doe. Particularly if they haven’t had reassignment surgery but otherwise have made no mention of their biological sex to anyone close to them.
I watch too much bad TV though.
Actually, now that I think about it, it might be useful when looking for a suspect as well. A proper gender swap would be an excellent way of ducking the police.
I still watch too much tv.
I know a woman who has stated her transgender situation as, “I used to be a man.”
We had a similar thing at university in the nineties. Some people in the students union decided that disabled people should be referred to as dysabled as dis- implied they could not do something and dys- implied that they had difficulty doing it. Or something.
I never heard a disabled person complain about the word disabled. Frankly, some people just want to be offended and/or love creating rules for others to follow.