It’s also completely untrue that sex can always be easily identified by a biologist.
Honestly, for me the biological piece is irrelevant. If a study came along showing that previous research was shoddy, and that human brains are not sexually dimorphic, and that folks experiencing gender dysphoria had no neurochemical markers to distinguish them from folks lacking that experience, it wouldn’t change my mind. Gender dysphoria, as I understand it, is a particular kind of unpleasantness, and unpleasantness is intrinsically subjective, not empirical. Since folks with this experience are autonomous, I look to them to determine how they want to solve this problem.
It’s kind of like how I don’t much care whether homosexuality is a choice or an inherent trait. If someone feels gay, why should the cause of their feeling matter to me?
Determining someone’s gender and the root influences of their gender can be devilishly difficult.
Oh, let me give one entirely random example; yeah, why not, other people are telling stories. I’ll tell you about someone close to me. She was twice diagnosed transgendered/transsexual more than 20 years ago (“twice,” because she panicked and didn’t believe the first doctor - after all, transsexuals are freaks! - so after trying to live in denial for a decade and feeling miserable she went back and was evaluated, and diagnosed again, after which she accepted the diagnosis). She also has had strangely high endogenous levels of estrogen, first noticed in her early 20’s coincident with the first diagnosis. But now they recently found out after an MRI series that they have a freaking tumor or cyst (it has yet to be determined and it’s too early to biopsy) in their brain which is apparently impacting hormone production, such that even though they are a genetic XY male, they produce almost no testosterone (I think the last test was “9”, when it should be “400” or higher) have an estrogen level about the same as a mid-cycle female, and high prolactin to boot. They have small breasts and feminine appearance, routinely “passing” without even trying - they recently went shopping all day in male jeans and a button-down shirt and are were “ma’am’d” and “lady’d” throughout the entire day. While dressed in a suit and tie they were stopped by US passport control because the agent wanted to check their gender to confirm it matched their ID. It’s unclear however when the tumor or cyst formed (the endocrinologist suspects it’s a cyst which formed at puberty) or if this influenced their lifelong strong feelings of gender dysphoria, or if it’s related at all. I honestly don’t think we have the science to figure it out at this juncture.
And then there’s folks with AIS, which can lead to even more severe physical effects. And there are chimeric individuals (although quite rare). And then there’s folks who have no overt or known physical factors who simply feel with the unalterable and complete certainty of their very soul that they simply are not their implied genetic gender.
So where do these people fall on the continuum of “sick” -are they mentally ill just like the Napoleon-complex example? Or are they just diseased individuals who need a cure? Should we perhaps have a telethon for them? Give them a few shots of good old American testosterone, then have them undergo intensive tag-team deprogramming until they’re sitting on a couch drinking Keystone Lite and watching football, scratching and grunting with the best of them like Manly Men do? And why not try to “cure” all those evil, craaaaaazy gays and lesbians running around too? And don’t forget bisexuals, a/k/a the “sexual double agents.”
But the truth is, while SRS is ultimately the destination of many TG persons, the best “cure” for some, and “treatment” for all, is love, acceptance, and the support of friends, family, co-workers, and religion. What I mean is, IMO, most of the anguish, anger, and fear which eats away at the psyche of TG/TS persons is not due to their being trapped in the wrong outside, but rather due to the way they are misused and abused. Being accepted in society, while it may not be the ultimate cure for any one person, will “treat” most of the negative symptoms. We need to let everyone live and love and dress and work and play as the gender they are, and just accept that they’re part of and sharing this fragile little speck hurtling through space.
In my view, this is a masterful analysis and sums up my feelings about the issue perfectly. Very well done post, LHOD.
Has that been established?
Regards,
Shodan
I think you are confusing the issue somewhat. I don’t think anyone here is suggesting transgendered people shouldn’t be allowed to use any and all safe remedies to alleviate their discomfort. Nobody has said we should be rude to people by calling them names they dislike, alienating them from society, or supporting those who make things harder for them. Most, in general, don’t want to deny them the dignity they afford any other person.
What some have trouble with is the insistence that you must accept “the narrative” at face value. That people are sometimes “born in the wrong body”. Or that you should feel compelled to substitute their reality for your own. Compassion dictates that one can empathize on some level with what transgendered people are going through. Just as people can appreciate in some small way how conflicted a guy who feels he is Napoleon might feel. In that situation though, we don’t typically expect people to alter their own perspectives just based on his feelings. Even if we grant that the guy really really feels he is Napoleon, we aren’t asked to collectively agree, or to move forward under the assumption, that that guy really is Napoleon.
That’s what you are asking someone to do. And while the relative harm here in allowing people to get gender reassignment surgery is small, I think you can appreciate that that is not always the case. For example, should doctors be allowed to amputate limbs for people who have body integrity identity disorder?
So while I think it’s pretty clear that a just society should treat everyone with respect, it’s a bit harder sell telling people that the truth they know is that malleable. Maybe it is, but haranguing them for not getting it soon enough is counter productive.
That’s a fair question, I think. I’ve seen conflicting information on this topic, and I don’t feel qualified to make a judgment on the topic. In general, I think it’s a call to be made between the transgender individual and his or her doctor (I say “in general” to allow for incompetent doctors and/or mentally incompetent transgender people), and I don’t see a reason to second-guess their decision. It seems likely to me that GID can range from people such as Una Persson’s friend, who unambiguously had something physiological going on, to schizophrenic people (although I have no idea how common it is, if schizophrenia can lead people to believe they’re werewolves, it seems plausible it could lead to the much less severe belief that they’re of the other sex–I’d expect such beliefs to be accompanied by factually incorrect statements about the presence of opposite-sex genitalia, for example). A study that encompasses everyone with GID and does not differentiate between these two examples might not be helpful in creating a plan of action for a specific person with GID. But your question is one that’s totally legitimate for GID folks to explore with their physicians.
My statements in this thread should be read more as philosophical rather than based on scientific evidence: as I said earlier, I don’t feel qualified to judge the scientific evidence DocCathode has offered, nor do I think I need to in order to decide that respecting an individual’s autonomy and self-identity is the ethical course of action in virtually all cases, including cases of sane folks with GID (and I use the word “sane” carefully here–if you must consider GID an insanity in order to consider the person insane, that creates a useless tautology).
Also, I recognize that my thinking on the subject may not be relevant to someone with GID. I’m writing about my thoughts as a cisgender person on how cisgender folks ought to respond to transgender folks.
Also: thanks, Bricker!
dare.ubvu.vu.nl/bitstream/1871/23255/1/189321.pdf
(emphasis added)
See also this study, which found general satisfaction except for some aspects of sexual performance post surgery: Rehman, Jamil et al. “The Reported Sex and Surgery Satisfactions of 28 Postoperative Male-to-Female Transsexual Patients” Archives of Sexual Behavior 28.1 (1999): 71-89.
Or this study, which seems to report success, while acknowledging others may not be successful: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1464-410X.2001.02323.x/full
So while that sounds bad at first, with “only a third report(ing) an acceptable sexual adjustment”, the key thing is that only “four [out of 66] considered gender reassignment retrospectively to have been a mistake.”
I probably have a dozen more studies reporting generally positive short and long-term outcomes, and about half that number reporting neutral or negative outcomes taking the day. Perhaps I can convince Cecil to take this question on. The issue is bigger than a couple of papers, and IIRC it generally is much more positive and in favor of SRS than against it, especially in European countries (the reasons I believe are typically less transphobia, an easier integration into society and greater legal protections).
Actually, trans people don’t use that phrase. Others made it up to talk about us and didn’t ask for our approval as that was back in the 1950s. Most trans people hate that phrase, in fact.
It’s quite simple—keep your judgments off of my person.
Like a Venn diagram:
(one circle:) <--- big space---> (other circle:)
My Body in between Your Business
That’s a great diagram, Johanna. To the extent that I’m asked to believe something about someone else’s being–whether it’s that their gender doesn’t match their appearance, or that they have an immortal soul–I’ll sometimes rebel. But if I’m not being asked to believe anything, it’d be absurd for me not to respect what the person believes.
Might as well throw my two cents in at this late date. Other than the use of the word “tranny”, I didn’t find anything in the story that was particularly offensive to transsexuals or transvestites. The writer was even careful enough to refer to the person as “she”. I’m assuming that no one finds the word “hooker” to be offensive anymore. I’ve known transgendered people, some who call themselves trannies. It depends on the person as to whether this is offensive or not.
My female sex is legally established under laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia and US federal law and applies across the board in my life. It is not in question in any sense.
Your believing or not believing is utterly irrelevant to my life. As long as you lay off saying or doing shit that harms trans people.
Which includes use of that damned word “tranny.”
There’s a certain inequity here: Others feel free to fling around that slur in this thread, while if I responded to them in kind, a Mod would blow the Mod whistle and direct me to The Pit. Never mind, I don’t need offensive language to express my meaning. All of yous reading this know well what we mean when we tell you don’t say “tranny.”
And things like “global warming”, “evolution”, “laws of physics” and etc are just terms that scientists use to boil very complex matters down into very simple ones. However here on the Straight Dope people have little tolerance for playing coy about this terms. If someone accepts the IPCC findings and most of the general narrative about “anthropogenic climate change” then most people would call bullshit if you insisted that somehow “global warming” didn’t apply to that collection of ideas.
Everything in science can be essentially as complex or as simple as the situation warrants. But I think very few biologists would flat out say “I’m incapable of sexing a human being based on a rudimentary physical examination.” They might couch it with caveats that really only apply to a super rare minority of humans with exceptionally rare physical deformities. GID people in general do not at all overlap with those people 1:1 or necessarily anything close to it.
The word gender is a perfectly good word for the “socially defined pseudo-sex based roles humans end up in”, but the reason the word started to be used that way in English is precisely because we needed a way to differentiate between what is immutable biology and what is based on social recognition and agreement. I don’t have much inclination to respect people who insist we also change the meaning of the word sex in its most common usage just because that would make people more comfortable. Nor am I particularly willing to go down the rabbit hole of “words in English always have variable meanings in different situations”, sex is a common enough term that people know what we’re talking about in regard to human anatomy.
I don’t doubt that it is not in question to you, but the man who believes he is Napoleon really believes it, it isn’t my contention that people with your contention are insincere. However law does not dictate scientific reality, and it never can, and it never will.
In a social context if someone wishes to identify as a specific gender, then I think we should respect that out of common courtesy. If someone has such severe mental illness that they need surgery to make their reality match their delusions, I support that when all other options have been exhausted, with the caveat that I hope some day we can do a lot better than that.
But here in Great Debates, this isn’t somewhere out in public and it isn’t a forum where people are just sharing personal stories or looking to engage in personal chit chat. Here, the actual scientific reality has a true place–and it isn’t at all inappropriate to continually assert it even if it upsets individuals here.
Religious beliefs are some of the most powerful feelings some people ever have. I don’t have them, but I know what it’s like to have them. Religion is also a legally protected class in this country (being transgendered isn’t, at least at the Federal level.) And all that being said, religious people are routinely told their beliefs are wrong, their opinions are faulty, and sometimes they are even attacked on a personal level in this forum–especially anytime those beliefs collide with science. I don’t understand why people think this scenario is any different, to me I think it just triggers different sensitivities. Dopers are prone to think of transgendered people as an oppressed minority who should not be held to the same rigorous standards that religious people are (who are seen as the evil oppressors.)
The simple fact is if you believe something to be contradicted by science, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t point that out on this board.
It’s not apples and apples. A primary reason religions and religious persons are questioned and insulted is over proselytizing. In many cases this impacts people not of that group because they wish to impose their will upon the rest of us.
But what sort of proselytization are transsexuals doing, exactly, which impacts everyone else in any serious manner? SSM impacts no cisgendered person who is currently or hope to be married. SRS impacts no cisgendered person, especially as AFAIK almost no, or perhaps no, health insurance plans cover it. There’s a world of difference between accommodating someone who says “I’m female in gender, please don’t call me a tranny” versus accommodating someone who says “I think we need a law to ban naughty, evil rap music for everyone because God told me he doesn’t like it.”
If I’m wrong and there’s this giant movement of TG/TS persons out there trying to impose their will on folks in the same manner that religious fundamentalists are trying to, I’d like to see examples.
Don’t use the word “sex.” What empirical, observable phenomena or traits do you think transgender people disagree with you (I almost wrote “scientists,” but I don’t want to give you some false dignity) about?
Maybe you’re right, but one of the cites I posted earlier is from The Guardian, which is in the UK. They claim to have reviewed “more than 100” studies. The reviewer also says -
Keep in mind that I am not necessarily disputing that post-op transexual persons are satisfied with the results of their surgery; I am questioning if SRS affects things like suicide rates. That was the claim that Left Hand of Dorkness and DocCathode made, and which I don’t know has been established.
Regards,
Shodan
In a quick lookthrough on your links, I saw something I may well have misunderstood. It looked as though, when looking at happiness rates among SRS subjects, they used as a control group cisgender folks who’d never undergone the surgery.
If that’s what they did, that’s pretty bizarre–it’s like studying whether chemotherapy makes people healthier by comparing the health of folks who’ve undergone chemotherapy to the health of folks who’ve never had cancer.
Gender dysphoria is a real condition, and one of its major symptoms seems to be severe, often suicidal, depression. The control group for folks who’ve undergone SRS should be folks with gender dysphoria who haven’t.
And even then, it’s problematic, since of course you’re not going to have a randomized, double-blind study: the folks who choose SRS are going to have similarities to one another that renders them a group distinct from the folks who forgo SRS.