Bull and shit, Arwin.

The BBQ Pit
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Your summary is a very good idea. These answer/reply threads with quotes sometimes get a little out of hand.

Content wise, my only criticisms are related to that you typically represent my views as either or, where I’ve been trying hard to make clear I don’t believe in that. In my view of the world, true and false, black and white, and many other ‘binary oppositions’ are actually abstract extremes of a long analogue transition line. No On/Off switches, but slidess. Clear? (here too many other means that there are still cases in which you can make a binary distinction).

No => few, and most of them not really important. To give a counter example, the concept of the possibility of a child growing in your body may obviously result in some psychological differences. But socially and culturally determined sex roles are
often gross overexaggerations of these few differences. If evolution once allowed the physiological differences between men and women to influence such roles to a large extent, those conditions no longer apply to anywhere near that extent, and those old roles have become obsolete. The historically relatively recent drastic repositioning of women in society is an accurate reflection of this, but many old habits die hard.

Agreed. It’s like the imagination, you can only construct your fantasies from what you know - just like in a sense creativity is combining old ideas in new ways. In that sense, however, it is also important to realise that currently, a 100% neutral environment currently doesn’t exist so that in principle anyone can, even without being restricted by their immediate environment, still develop a strong gender identity as well as a weak one (or none at all).

Stressing that at least your presentation of 3 would be grossly incomplete if anyone would take them out of context of 6 below.

You developed a strong gender identity because your parents offered you the world as a place where there are strong gender identities. You identified yourself more strongly with the female one, because your natural preferences and characteristics suited that role much more than that of boys. (Actually there are many reasons why you would want to identify more with the one than the other).

This is not something I said. I merely said that society often enforces gender roles very strongly and that this may cause gender identity problems to varying degrees, and, together with possible other undealt with problems that transsexualism might have supplanted, are issues that are going to be important when someone approaches you and confides he or she as a gender identity issue.

… when they are diagnosed as untreatable mentally, or when sexual reassignment is a far more practical therapy than therapy. But I’m nitpicking, short answer is yes.

Well, as corrected above. As to your second post, I support your basic message, and have as long as I’ve had an opinion on the subject (first formed some 5 or so years ago, thanks to a Dutch documentary).

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(and I pit “gross overexaggerations” in my previous posts, but then we’re conveniently already there)

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(and while we’re at it, I pit the ‘s’ in ‘posts’ in my post immediately above this one)

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Arwin:

In response to 1 and 2 above, you stated that you believe that there are few inherent differences between the sexes, and strong gender identities are social constructs.

You’re wrong.

There is ample research that many sex differences are hardwired into us, even in infants and toddlers there are noticable, quantifiable behavioral differences between the sexes even in infants too young to have formed a concept of gender. This is supported by the observed sex differences in primates closely related to humans.

Cite.

Cite.

Cite.

Cite.

Cite.

Cite.

Cite.

Cite.

There is evidence that indicates that there are female brains and male brains, and that transsexuals have the brain of the opposite sex. Your rejection of the science because it doesn’t fit with your thoery does not negate it. It’s there, it points to a specific conclusion–that transsexuality is caused by physical structures in the brain–and you’ve offered nothing other than your thoery to combat this idea. You say that the evidence is weak due to the small sample size.

But you cannot simply reject it because it doesn’t fit your pet thoery without offering conflicting evidence.

Read what you wrote here: my “natural preferences and characteristics” made me strongly identify with female roles. I agree. My having a female self-identity is natural–it is an inborn quality.

Also, even if my parents had made no attempt to socialize me male, the differences would still have been all around me.

People who can be treated mentally are not transsexuals, and are usually screened out in therapy.

Sexual reassignment is the one best treatment for transsexuals, and in most cases is the only effective treatment.

Do you continue to stand behind these statements:

  1. In reference to SRS not being done on a whim:

SRS is not elective cosmetic surgery. It is corrective surgery performed by a plastic surgeon. More comparable would be breast reconstruction done a woman who had had a radical double mastectomy due to breast cancer. To compare SRS to fuller lips is glib and insulting.

Are you prepared to retract these statements?

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Kaitlyn, please tell me you did not actually cite the pseudo-science offered by NARTH to make your point above? NARTH?? The quacks who also believe that it’s acceptable and possible to “cure” homosexuality?

Also, directly quoted from one of your cites:

Seems to go against your point, don’t it?

While I wasn’t able to open all of the cites you gave, the ones I was able to look were not particularly convincing. Another issue I have with your cites is that it’s always easier to find studies that highlight the differences between men and women, because a study that seeks to find similarities between the sexes just doesn’t make headlines. “Men and Women are Pretty Similar” - not very catchy.

It’s not all biology. It’s not all cuture/environment. It’s the interaction between both of those things that creates differences in gender presentation and identity. But then again, I have a feeling most of us would agree with that and simply argue over whether biology or culture/environment plays a greater role in that process of differentiation.

NARTH…i pit those bastards.

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Yep, I screwed up several of my cites big time. Massive brain fart.

An aquaintance convinced I can be “cured” sent me a bunch of links to sites like NARTH, and Misogyny International, and I pasted them into my post without checking carefully. Those were supposed to go to my brother so that he could see what the wackos think about me and people like me. He’s probably wondering why I e-mailed him research abstracts about aggression and facial perception in infants.

It would have been really embarassing if I’d linked to the radical feminists who say that I’m still a man and am trying to infiltrate their sex.

Ignore those, please, unless you are a biological determinist when it comes to sex roles, in which case they’re probably right up your alley.

Not really. I don’t have a problem with the idea that many sex differences are socialized, or that those that are biological are reinforced through socialization. Indeed my contention is that my brain is hardwired female, and that part of the reason I’ve adopted such extremely feminine sex roles results from my reaction to my parents having tried to socialize me male. It’s both biology and socialization.

I have no problem with the idea that men and women are more similar than different, or with the idea that there’s more variation within the sexes than there is between them. But that has to do with sex roles, not sexual identity. Two different things.

No disagreement here.

My contention all along has been that I have a female brain in a male body, and that’s the source of my gender identity. My female brain needed female hormones to be able to function properly. I can’t prove this, but I do know how my psychological health changed for the better when I began taking female hormones long before any apparent physical changes occurred.

The culture in which I grew up has some very well defined notions of feminine and masculine, and I was drawn strongly to the more feminine. I believe that I would likely have been drawn to whatever the culture defined as feminine as a result of my identifying more with girls and women. Growing up in North Korea would have been hell for someone like me, not that it’s a picnic for anyone.

My parents’ attempt to socialize me male probably contributed to my adopting a very feminine way of presenting myself to the world, probably more so than I would have chosen if they had tried to raise me in a gender neutral way, as Arwin’s parents did him.

But I have no doubt that I am naturally feminine, and would be attracted to whatever the culture in which I was raised defined as feminine. Sex roles are of course an interaction between biology, socialization, and environment.

My contention with Arwin was his insistence that my gender identity, and gender identity in general, is created socially, and thus could be treated through therapy. Such claims are right in line with what NARTH says in the very cite I mistakenly posted here. Reinforced or given focus by culture and socialization, certainly. Created by socialization, certainly not.

And I pit myself for including them and those Misogyny assholes in my cites. For the record, I also disagree witht the conclusion of the same sex education people, but found that cite to be a good summary of some brain sex research.

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Whew! You’re off my “WTF?” list and back on my “Respect though maybe we don’t quite agree” list. (Ooh, and as an aside, those radical feminists really bust my hump too, so to speak. Ever heard of the Camp Trans protest outside the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival? I SO want to be there this summer…)

I guess where I’m getting stuck on this whole issue is the difference between “sexual identity” and “sex roles”. You seem to see them as partly or entirely different, if I’m getting your argument correct. I really don’t. Sexual (or gender) identity to me seems to be a really abstract term. It’s that “knowing” of being a man or a woman. I wish I could wrap my head around it, but perhaps I just can’t and will never be able to. I attribute that sense of knowing one is a man or a woman to psychological and cultural factors, mostly, including a cultural script for sex roles. And a teeny-tiny bit to biology.

Whatever. Seeing as you can’t prove that your gender identity is the result of a feminine brain, and I can’t prove it’s NOT, we’re left with hypotheses and appreciating everyone’s right to live in the body they’re most comfortable with.

Kaitlyn, because it can’t be said enough, I just want to say that I appreciate the opportunity to listen to your very personal and unique perspective. Getting too mushy for the pit, though. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yeah, I’ve heard of them, and that would be wonderful to be able to go. But I’ll be having surgery at roughly the same time, so going this year is out.

That’s what it is. The sense that one is male or female. This doesn’t always correspond to how masculine or feminine one is. There are femme FTM and masculine MTF. There are feminine men who nonetheless want to be men, and masculine women who are happy being women.

I tried a RLE before undergoing hormones–I essentailly lived as a woman for an entire summer. Passing for and living as a woman wasn’t what I needed. It was the hormones, which I was taking during the school year while passing myself off as male that made the biggest difference. Sex roles had nothing to do with it. I had the female sex role, and it wasn’t enough. Female body chemistry made a huge difference. It was a visceral, physical reaction to the hormones. My brain craved a high estrogen level to be able to function properly.

You probably never will, and that’s a good thing. I suspect it’s the kind of thing you can only understand by living it.

The science on phsyical brain structures indicates that the primary cause of transsexualism is physical differences in the brain, probably induced by abnormal hormone levels present at about the seventh week in the womb. Nothing has been proven to a scientific certainty, but there’s been no contrary evidence either.

Female brain. That I am also quite feminine is secondary. Plenty of men who enjoy being men have feminine personalities. A person can be female without being feminine. I was never a feminine man, I was a woman, and no matter how feminine a lifestyle I was able to adopt, no matter how much I immersed myself in the female sex roles–and I did so completely–it wasn’t enough.

Thank you. I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree about causation–though the science is on my side–since we do agree on the far more important point that sexual reassignment is a necessary and appropriate treatment for gender identity dysphoria, regardless of how the condition came to be.

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I don’t mean to be snarky, Kaitlyn, but as long as you never claim to have experienced what it was like to be both a man and a woman (a claim I’ve never seen you make, to be fair), then you are being consistent, since you are and have always been a woman, according to you.

So, according to you, no one (not James/Jan Morris, not any of our other transsexual dopers) has ever experienced life as both a man and a woman, or indeed ever could? They have no unique insights in that respect - and never could - because they were always a woman.

They could perhaps shed a bit of light on the relative merits and dismerits of having breasts against not having breasts, for example, but beyond that their experiences would be very little different from those of someone (like Tootsie)who dressed up as a woman and passed himself off as one?

I’m logging off now, but will be back to respond later.

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Kaitlyn, does it follow from what you’ve said here that I can have my brain examined by professionals and they can tell me what gender I am?

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Not by some of your own evidence:

No there isn’t - there is evidence that certain differences correlate somewhat with sex differences, but look at the quote I gave above. Individual differences are much greater than sex differences, and parents can influence us from very early on.

I’m willing to submit that there is evidence that statistically, girls may pay more attention to looks, and boys may be rougher. The latter is caused by higher levels of testosterone (that can however be at a later age influenced by masturbation, thankfully) and it is also what I thought about when you said you felt more comfortable with higher levels of oestrogen. During the age 14-15, boys can get very high levels of testosterone for a while, that is so strong that it prevents them from being able to concentrate longer than 20-25 minutes, often disadvantaging them compared to girls of the same age. This phase is not comfortable.

It’s just that you have to be so very careful with generalisations and statistics. I abhor research that comes up with your average “men and women show a difference of 0.4% on math scores average and so men must be better at math”. This only means that in 100 people, there is half a man better at math. It also means that there are in that group probably 10 women better at math than at least 40 men. Individual differences are key here and I maintain that these are usually a lot larger than the average sex-bound differences.

I do not have to negate this as there is no positive evidence. Your evidence is as strong as saying God must exist because there are Churches.

Which is true, as you should know if you have any respect for science for science sake, rather than a very subjective need to see something a certain way. Your “fit your pet theory” comment below pisses me off. If you want me to produce a cite for anything in particular, just ask.

What you claim does not follow from the research. To reject it, I therefore don’t need conflicting evidence.

I can, however, come up with piles of evidence for my theory, as my theory is very conventional, scientifically speaking. A lot more research has been done on cultural influence on gender identity than on transsexuality. (there’s lot of stuff out there like this link right here: FindArticles.com | CBSi
)

We are however currently in the aftermath of that scientific and cultural period, where we discover the limits of cultural influence and are more interested by now in what true physical differences (DNA and so on) there are. As usual in such periods, we temporarily exaggerate the importance of what we investigate, in order to explore the boundaries of its application. But I am a realist and a generalist and like to view things as much as they are as possible.

You claim it is, I point out ‘weaknesses’ in the evidence you give, and I have have suggested alternative explanations that might be applicable to your individual case.

I said that, but I take you mean that you would still have been a transsexual if your parents hadn’t attempted to socialize you male.

In other words, your distinction between transsexuals and non-transsexuals is purely based on which kinds of treatment is most successful? That sounds like a definition of Artificial Intelligence I once came across: Intelligence is that which cannot be done by computers. Note that by this definition, Intelligence does not come into play during a chess game.

If you are going to be consistent in your definition, then sexual reassignment is always the only effective treatment for transsexuals, because otherwise by your definition above they wouldn’t be transsexuals.

Do you continue to stand behind these statements:

My mother has had breast cancer, twice. I cannot begin to explain how insulted I am starting to get by having put words in my mouth, or the readiness of people to misconstrue my words for their own political agenda or because their own prejudices start getting in the way of their reading capabilities.

Obviously! I was indicating why I worry that SRS will always only be available to people who go through the channels that provide the full counselling and aren’t more interested in just making money out of you. I pointed out current practices in the cosmetic surgery industry as an example of why this fear of mine exists.

For quite obvious reasons, no.

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Yes. Although (given current limitations of technology) they would have to kill you to do it.

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I second that, aware that my last post is a tad hostile. But it happens so often that I get stuff projected onto me in discussions because people read so subjectively, it gets tiring.

@Othersider: Duh. They can do that based on any one little cell from any little old part of your body.

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That’ll just tell you your chromosomal sex, which doesn’t necessarily correlate to your gender.

Of course, you’re still refusing to listen to the evidence on that one, so I’m not surprised to see you spout further nonsense on this point.

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I am not. In most dictionaries, gender means just that:

[n] the properties that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles; “she didn’t want to know the sex of the foetus”.

But perhaps you are right in the sense that the hardwired gender identity as described by Kaitlyn is the definition being asked for here. In which case I apologise for having trouble learning the new definition of the word gender in the current context and for not having considered the question longer to realise the possibility.

And thank you for calling my carefully written words ‘further nonsense’. That is so very kind of you.

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I think that you and I have reached this point too. I’m just going to close with this wonderfully accessible little pamphlet that I came across and which explains a lot of stuff (including abuse of research) in a wonderfully accessible way:

http://www.campbell-kibler.com/Stereo.pdf

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In terms of gender identity, that is true. I’ve always been female.

In terms of my gender identity, I’d say that’s accurate. I have no experience with having a male gender identity.

I have, however, had the experience of being both physically male and physically female, and I have had the experience of having lived and presented myself to the world as a man and as a woman.

So I’ve had many of the same experiences that men have, both physically and socailly, but they’ve been filtered through a female self identity.

That’s not really parallel. The characters in Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire were actors playing a part. They weren’t physically women, and they were able to go back to their true sex at the end of the day. The were the way they were by choice. None of this is true of the transsexual, who has no choice but to live life as the wrong physical sex, until treatment.

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Nope. That supports my claim that certain sex based differences are innate. That they are present at birth and consistent throughout the first year indicates that these are biological differences unaffected by socialization. Socialization then enhances or dimishes the intensity of these differences depending upon whether they are reinforced or not.

Yep, such a difference would be statistically insignificant.

How about a study that shows a physical difference between men and women that correlates 100% with gender identity?

Saying there is no evidence is simply incorrect. That you choose not to accept the evidence does not mean it does not exist.

Your analogy is specious. A closer analogy here would be that theists must exist because there are churches, and this is a demonstrably true statement. These two situations are parallel in that both are self diagnosed conditions–I believe in God / I believe I am female. The difference is that in the case of MTF transsexuals, they’ve dissected the brains and found that they did indeed have brains with female physical structures.

Fine. You’ve been given a cite to support the idea that MTF transsexuals have brains with female brain structures. Provide me with a cite that disputes this finding.

Yes it does. Rejecting the evidence does not cause it to cease to exist.

That’s research on sex roles, not gender identity. The name of the journal is sex roles, and the name of the article is gender identity roles. It’s talking about how attitudes towards gender and what roles are appropriate for the genders are appropriate.

It’s irrelevant. I’ve been saying all along that I agree with the idea that there is a large variety within the sexes in how gender roles are chosen, socialized, and expressed. Sex roles are not what were talking about here. Gendere identity is an internal sense of whether one is male or female. There are feminine FTM transsexuals–Lazz offered himself as an example–and masculine MTF transsexuals. The sex roles one choses to adopt are a separate issue from gender identity.
[/quote]

Your explanation is laughable. My brother was socialized male, and grew up into a macho tough guy. Millions of boys are socialized male and become masculine men. If attempting to socialize a physically male child into a male role caused transsexualism, there would be millions of us instead of 40,000.

The interpretation that I give is pretty much the one agreed upon by Mrs. Six, a psychologist, and a psychiatrist, all of whom know my case intimately. Your trying to shoehorn me into your thoery of socially created sexual identity doesn’t fit the facts.

[quoteI said that, but I take you mean that you would still have been a transsexual if your parents hadn’t attempted to socialize you male. [/quote]

Exactly.

No. There are conditions which present aspects similar to transsexualism that are not. Crossdressers, autogynyphillic fetishists, and gay males who want to be socially acceptable all should be excluded because they are male and thus sexual reassignment is not indicated for their conditions (none of which are really disorders of any kind). Indeed sexual reassignment is a disaster for such men, as it removes the sexual elements of the male sex drive that makes their activities sexually satisfying. The purpose of therapy is to exclude these men from treatments that would harm them.

Yep. Transsexuals are people who have a strong gender identity that is the opposite of their physical sex and who seek sexual reassignment to correct this. Once those with other condtions are elminated, there is noo other effective treatment for this disorder has been found.

Bullshit. I quoted you word for word. If you dont want to be criticized for comparing SRS with lip injections, don’t compare them.

Wonderful. My psychologist and psychiatrist aren’t really helping me, they’re just putting me through channels to make money off of me.

Are you seriously implying that the whole therapuetic community exists to promote the idea of transsexuality so that the people involved can make money?

You’re an idiot.

Then you’re an asshole and an idiot.

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So I gathered from Law & Order (heh). Does anyone know why that is? They didn’t talk about it much.

I guess it’s obvious that if the technology were to improve to the point that we could do this to living people, we could present this to persons who believe their gender and their sex are different, and that (in theory) might make the decision a little easier.

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The location known to be correlated to gender is a brain structure (the basal striata terminalis) down near the brainstem. The only way to measure it at present is by dissection; current imaging technology is inadequate.

I am hoping that the technology does develop to that point; not only would it make the decision easier but it would make it more clear that that transsexualism a form of intersexuality, and thus a birth defect, rather than a “lifestyle choice”, which would make it that much harder to deny reassignment on the grounds that it’s a “cosmetic procedure”.