Having been on the other side of the coin more often than I care to recall, I know it’s tough to be the one person responding to eighteen different posters all on the other side of the argument, mswas and I appreciate your patience in getting to each inquiry.
This is a person with an XY chromosone pair. Absent the insensitivity to androgen, this person would certainly appear to be male. But they have completely female-appearing bodies. No ovaries or uterus, of course, and undescended testes in place of the ovaries. They are absolutely infertile.
They look, externally, like women. In fact, they often appear to be very beautiful women, since a side effect of the syndrome is often clear skin, unmarred by acne.
Nonetheless, they have “male,” XY chromonosones and a blood test would reveal an adult male testosterone level.
I’m going to nitpick the OP just a bit: By “we”, do you mean as individuals or as a society? If you mean as a society then clearly the answer is yes, we do. Civil rights are not predicated on a person’s anatomy, only that one is, in fact, a human being. Beyond that our government is (in theory, at least) blind to all other aspects of the person. Of course, this is a broad generalization, but it’s the basic truth of equality.
If, however, you mean as individuals then the answer is no, we do not. If I discovered that a male colleague had been born female it would not affect acceptance of his work; if, however, I had been playing poker with him for two years and he then told me he had had gender reassignment surgery (I think that’s the politically correct terminology nowadays) we would not play poker again.
The difference? In my public life I care nothing for a person’s politics, religion, beliefs, biases or sexual proclivities. Colleagues and casual acquaintances can be or do anything they want to. But when I begin to develop a friendship with someone, an emotional attachment becomes part of the friendship, and the person’s sense of identity, history and beliefs are important to me. When I am with friends I let my guard down and I have to be comfortable with those friends. Men who were once women and vice versa are simply outside my confort level, just like temperatures that are too low or sofas that are too hard or clothes that are too tight. It’s possible something could happen to change that, but I’m not going to actively pursue it.
I am tailoring my argument to materialists. Speaking about non-materialist notions on this board is pretty well a lost cause. I never said anything about those being sum totals, only that they were attributes.
I’d probably agree, though I am rather ignorant of Plato. The whole notion of the Philosopher King is one of the greatest travesties of all time IMO. If you ever wanted to elucidate that position, I’d be quite interested to hear it. However, as far as normative ideals go, it’s useful to have stable poles around which you can define things. If Man and Woman do not have stable definitions it is not possible to discuss notions of varying degrees of maleness or femaleness.
redtail There is another place you and I must differ then. You consider ‘imperious declaration’ to be synonymous with debunking. I notice the word ‘debunked’ is used fairly flippantly around here. I’ve heard a great number of arguments dismissed because they had been debunked by some imperious declaration in some thread or another.
fish :rolleyes: This whole all or nothing approach is tedious. This is the last time I am going to say it to you. I gave ‘ATTRIBUTES’ of what makes a woman a woman. If you haven’t noticed, both men and women who cannot reproduce have a crisis of gender identity quite often, or at least it is a common theme in modern day narrative. People talk about not having a uterus or a penis as making them ‘less of a woman’ or ‘less of a man’. You make it out as though I am just making this shit up.
I don’t understand your quotation of the luxury part.
Sunrazor Thank you for responding to the OP and not to my worth as a person for asking the question. The question that I asked has really been barely addressed here. To what degree do we as a society owe it to individuals to be tolerant of their aberrations? Should we accept every genetic abnormality and try to stuff it into an established category then pretend like it fits even though it is clearly outside of that norm? Sure the transgender issue doesn’t really affect people, but what if say the person contracted some kind of illness that caused them to stink horribly. Would it be ok to fire them then? Does tolerance have a limit? If so, what is that limit?
Bricker It’s tough to keep straight when 80% of the people you are responding to are making basically the same argument with only different details.
Yes, I know that. But what does it matter? We’ve established that you’re not going to date nor breed with either of them, in fact you probably won’t even meet either of them in person. Why do you need to differentiate between them?
You’re not really answering the question, you’re simply repeating your materialistic definition.
Because it tells you things about that person’s identity. It doesn’t reduce us to a malleable substrate that is subject only to what we tell people our identity is at the time.
And how do you know? There are innumerable things about the people in your life that you know nothing about, including, I’ll bet, whether or not they are transgendered. Why are you so against something that will most likely never make itself apparent to you? (directed at mswas)
What does it tell you about their identity? How does this knowledge alter how you interact with them? And I mean you specifically, as a married man with a child who is not going to attempt to impregnate the woman in question.
That people are given their cross to bear so to speak. They are who they are, and we should work on understanding who and what that is, rather than pretending that things can be altered with surgery. Who they were before the surgery is just as much a part of who they are after the surgery, just as any other big life change. Who I was before I had a baby is relevant, it’s part of who I am, part of my identity, that doesn’t change just because I change the paradigm. The way people are identifying it here, we should ignore that.
Removing the context makes the argument irrelevant. We are talking on an internet message board, so it’s not terribly important what they are, but that doesn’t mean I am going to give the word woman over to being twisted to mean whatever people want it to mean. Until I see that I am overwhelmed by public opinion on the subject I will continue to use woman the way I have been and transgender the way I have been.
So without context involved then yes, the word woman has purely a materialistic biological distinction, but identity as an individual means more than that. Cutting a hole in someone’s crotch and inverting their penis doesn’t change the unalterable facts about who they are and the sum of their identity.
Yes, but do you go around telling new people you meet that you used to be childless? If you do, then the rest of what I say is moot, but I’ll wager you don’t; you tell people you have a child currently. In the same way, why should transgenders go around telling people they used to be male/female? Can’t they just say they’re female/male now?
OK, but if you meet a woman, say at work. It’s a desk job. Her gender doesn’t affect her work. Her gender only affects your interactions in the sense that she’s now a woman, so you’ll interact with her as a woman (in whatever difference that makes to you, because I don’t really understand why you’d interact differently with female and male coworkers).
What possible need could you have for the information that she used to present as a different gender? So you can treat her differently? Why? She’s a woman NOW and that’s what’s important NOW. She wants to be treated as a woman, just like any other woman. Why would her past matter?
Would you also expect her to reveal other personal information that’s none of your business? Do you expect her to tell you about her health history? Her childhood? Her sexual kinks? Her past marital status? Her finances and financial history?
I can’t imagine why transgendered individuals deserve any more or less consideration than anyone else. We have a much responsibility to accept them as we do anyone else. Would we have any reason to treat them with less respect or consideration than we would anyone else because they changed their gender?