Well to be the Devil’s Advocate for a moment, it’s generally accepted that we all share a common ancestor. We share between 98.6 and 99% of our DNA with chimps, I’ve read we share 90% of our DNA with cats, and we’re more closely related to cows than rodents.
Have you heard of “otherkin”, they are pretty much dismissed by most people, but why?
Maybe it sounds like a joke now but hey maybe it will be the next civil rights movement, where people want to be identify as animals and given certain acknowledgment and rights. At a certain point words have meanings and connotations, I don’t know the answer, if you were born with a penis and testicles can you legitimately be called a woman? I don’t think so, at least not in the eyes of most people, at what point are you just feeding delusion, and at what point are you being respectful? I’m not sure but I don’t claim to know all the answers either.
Gender is primarily a societal construct, and secondary sex characteristics all start in the same way before they diverge due to hormonal influences. We start off with the same junk. The difference between biologically male and biologically female is an awful lot narrower than we generally think. And it’s infinitely narrower than the distance between human and nonhuman. So I’m not sure a slippery slope argument is particularly supportable.
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I mean you can be called anything, so literally yes you could. A lot of feminists don’t consider MTF to be considered “real women”, are they wrong I don’t know, does their opinion carry more weight, should it? Again I’m not sure, Rachel Dolezal or whatever her name was obviously considered herself to be black, even though most people would call her white, I don’t claim to know the answers, I’m asking the questions but I’m smart enough to know I don’t know all the answers, at what point are we just arguing semantics vs. facts?
No, this is very misleading. You need to understand exactly what is being discussed when we talk about these inter-species divergence numbers.
When the human-chimp sequence divergence is quoted as 98-99% that refers only to single base differences within alignable homologous sequence. This measure is often used because single base mutations are fairly frequent and uniformly distributed through evolutionary time, providing a quantitative measure - a molecular clock - that allows us to look at the relative divergence between different pairs of species. So it’s a valid metric to think about (for example) how the human-chimp evolutionary divergence compares to the human-cat evolutionary divergence.
But this measure ignores many other very substantial types of difference - insertions and deletions, even the fusion of two entire chromosomes on the human lineage. The total difference between human and chimp genomes is hard to quantify because it includes many different types of difference, but it’s far greater than 1%. Furthermore, the human-chimp differences occur throughout the entire genome, and even small sequence differences can sometimes make very significant differences to proteins or gene expression. So a lot of genes have significant differences between humans and chimps. Furthermore, a critical part of making a chimp is that the chimp grows in a chimp womb, and the chimp intra-uterine environment is different from a human. So it’s utterly inconceivable that a human embryo growing in a human womb could ever develop with the brain of some other species.
When considering human males vs females, I said that they share over 99% of their genetic material, but I meant something rather different. The 99% of genetic material found on the autosomes and the X is exactly the same for either sex, males and females obviously have shared ancestry, we’re the same species. All of that common genetic material is involved in making human males and human females. Sexual dimorphism is usually triggered by the presence or absence of the ~1% of the genome that’s found on Y. And we already know that the dimorphism trigger doesn’t always work the same. For example, in the case of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome an XY karyotype can make lead to a partially or completely female phenotype.
So I’ll reiterate the scientific claim I made in my earlier post more strongly:
Phenotype is always the result of a complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors. All humans of both sexes share the vast majority of their genetic material. Sexual dimorphism has both somatic elements (genitalia and othe body differences) and behavioural elements (a male or female mental state). Given the common genetic material, it’s not that surprising that in some cases the mental phenotype might not be fully in accord with the somatic phenotype - in other words, that humans might occasionally develop with a male mind and female body or vice versa. And once again I’ll emphasize that a mental phenotype is a neuron configuration with just the same objective physical reality as a penis or a vagina.
So the idea that a trans person has a mental phenotype that differs from their somatic phenotype is (a) scientifically plausible, and (b) true - unless you think they are all lying because they enjoy the persecution and abuse of bigots.
Whereas it is scientifically ludicrous so suggest that somebody with a human genome who gestated in a human womb could ever develop with the actual mind of any other species. So the “slippery slope” argument that recognizing the objective reality of the mental state of trans people is qualitatively similar to accepting that a human being is actually a cat is nonsense.
That’s because gender is a much more flexible category for human beings than rigidly-defined religious or legal statuses like godhead or protectorship.
That’s because we as a society are currently shifting our societal definition of “woman” away from oversimplified binary genetic/anatomical characteristics, and reinterpreting it as a form of personal identity. If you persistently, consistently and insistently identify as a woman, then for societal purposes, you are a woman, no matter what’s in your underwear or on your birth certificate.
Nobody is “ignoring” any “basic truth” about Caitlyn Jenner. Nobody is denying or suppressing the fact that she was born with a penis and testicles, was male-assigned at birth, and is therefore a transgender woman.
Caitlyn Jenner is not delusional, nor is she ignoring any basic truth: she knows perfectly well that she was born with male anatomy/chromosomes. The point is that being born with male anatomy/chromosomes does not disqualify somebody from being socially classified as a woman if they identify as a woman.
As Riemann and andros explained, it is not a form of mental illness to have female gender identity combined with male chromosomes/anatomy, any more than it’s a form of mental illness to have, say, male chromosomes/anatomy combined with sexual attraction to other males. (Although many people proclaimed for many years that homosexuality was a form mental illness too.)
So-called Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), who deny that transgender women are “real women”, are definitely wrong about whether it’s biologically and cognitively possible for a person to have, as Riemann said, “a mental phenotype that differs from their somatic phenotype” when it comes to gender identity.
How to define the socially-constructed category of “real women” is a longstanding controversy that has historically involved many bigoted and ignorant opinions. Many people still don’t consider lesbians, or unmarried women, or women with short hair, or whatever, to be “real women”, for example. No, I know of no reason why the bigoted and ignorant opinions of TERFs about transgender women should carry more weight in this controversy than anybody else’s.
You seem to simply reassert your argument: that if a man claims that he is a woman and identifies as such, then he (she) IS a woman. Full stop. That’s great, but that is your argument. It is not more persuasive just because you repeat it or if you name call your opponents.
Your argument, taken to its logical conclusion could apply to anything. If Caitlyn Jenner says that she is the Lord God Almighty, you point out that is objectively false and we should not indulge that because it is not true. Even if she claims to self-identify as God, we still say “Caitlyn, as much as you would like to be God, you simply are not” no matter how much that would hurt her feelings.
But when it comes to gender, somehow “we” (which I don’t remember voting on) have decided that the word does not mean what it has always meant. It is not something you get to choose anymore than you can choose your ancestry or your race or indeed even if you were born a human being.
You poo-pooed the idea that someone could self identify as a chimp, but there is no reason they could not under the definitions and rationales that you have provided.
I will do so later this evening, but is my understanding incorrect? I thought that the rule was that if a person identified as a particular gender, then that was the end of the inquiry. We do not need further proof or quiz the person on how really sincere they are.
If a guy walks into the ladies’ restroom and you stop him and way “Whoa, pal. That’s the ladies room” and he claims that he identifies as female, then all is good, carry on. Is that incorrect?
And you’re just repeating your “slippery slope” argument, completely ignoring the explanation that I and others have given for why it’s nonsense.
It is scientifically preposterous to suggest that someone with the genome of a human who gestated in a human womb could actually have the brain of another species. Not that I’m advocating abusing and mocking a subculture of people who strongly identify with other species - why shouldn’t they be allowed to live the way they want to live? But claiming that this is somehow equivalent to transgender people is ludicrous.
It is scientifically perfectly plausible that in terms of the bimodal sexually dimorphic human phenotype, people could occasionally develop with a mental phenotype that is not in accord with their somatic phenotype. You suggest that there is some kind of objective a priori scientific “basic truth” to the notion that somebody with a penis must always have the mental identity of a man, and this is simply false.
And your straw man is no more robust by virtue of repeating it. Are you unable to grasp that a transgender person making sincere and consistent claims about their mental state is not just being whimsical?
Mental phenotypes have just as much objective reality as a penis or a vagina. We may one day have the technology to actually scan people’s neuronal configuration to find measurable physiological correlates to the mental gender phenotype, i.e. gender identity. Whether we would choose to do that I don’t know. But in any event, the only way we currently have to know someone’s mental phenotype is to listen to what they say about it.
So, what are you claiming?
That when transgender people tell us about their mental state, that they are lying? Given the horrific prejudice and abuse that they suffer, that’s hardly credible.
That they are mentally ill? By what definition? In order for something to be classified as a mental illness, it must satisfy some criterion for dysfunction; and perhaps some degree of malleability that might allow a “cure” that would increase well being. What is your evidence that transgender people satisfy either of these criteria? Transgender people are no less intrinsically dysfunctional than cisgender people, and if they have higher rates of depression and suicide that’s likely because of the way they are treated in society. Certainly, attempting to change gender identity to conform to somatic phenotype does not work and is often extremely distressing.
There’s no evidence that transgender people are generally whimsical or insincere in their statement of their own internal mental state. There’s no evidence that transgender people fit any sensible definition of mental illness. It’s makes little sense to suggest that somebody would pretend to be transgender. And furthermore, transgenderism is a priori perfectly plausible from a scientific perspective.
Surely the simplest explanation - not to mention the attitude that’s in accord with respect and basic human decency - is to conclude that transgender people are telling the truth about their gender identity, and that it is objectively just as real as a cisgender persons’s identity. A mental phenotype that is not in accord with somatic phenotype is just part of the normal range of human diversity.
Bathroom etiquette is and should be entirely different from rules for incarcerating prisoners. Do you have any reason to believe why they should operate under the same principles?
What I recall from those threads is that several people would propose that it was as simple as just saying “I am a girl” just to go into women’ rooms(much like you have done in this thread-were you one of those that have made this simplistic suggestion before?), and others would point out that it was just a wee bit more complicated that.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of trans people, nor do I believe that they are making anything up. It must be awful to be pulled in different directions like that, and I have no desire to poke fun or otherwise make light of the situation.
But being as sympathetic as I can, I cannot in good conscience allow words to be redefined in order to help these people anymore than you would allow chimp to be redefined to include human beings who really feel like they are a chimp. If I say that horse is a stallion and that one is a mare, or that cow is a bull,or that deer is a buck, we know what we are talking about because of biology.
When a male child is born and the doctor says, “It’s a boy!” is he incorrect? Should he say “Well, the child is biologically male, but we must wait until he or she is of sufficient age or maturity to make the ultimate decision regarding gender for himself or herself”?
We do not indulge any other type of incorrect thinking in this manner: by acquiescing to the person’s incorrect thinking and demanding that it be observed by everyone else in society. Why do we do it for just this one thing, and what is to stop the slippery slope?
I’m sure that the guy who thinks that he is Jesus would feel much better internally if you addressed him as such. Why not do that? You say it is factually wrong, but this is also factually wrong.
So why all this nonsense about guys with beards saying “I’m a girl” just to go into a ladies room and harass them, if no amount of authentication and/or counseling and/or surgical procedures will convince you?
To a biologist, the fact that a sexually dimorphic phenotype includes both somatic and behavioral elements is canonical. The fact that you might not know this is not a matter of “good conscience”. Introducing a colloquial term “gender identity” to refer to the behavioral aspects of the sexually dimorphic phenotype (the mental state) is perfectly reasonable.
You imply that treating a transgender person with respect when they describe their gender identity is somehow equivalent to granting that someone can turn themselves into a chimp by saying whimsically “I’m a chimp”. What on earth is that if not doubting the sincerity of transgender people?
Evidently you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a professional biologist, my specialty was genetics and molecular biology, and I’ve given you an extensive scientific explanation of why you are wrong. Do you have an actual scientific rebuttal, or are you planning to simply keep repeating your misconceptions ad nauseam?
In short, the latter. The doctor can apprehend the somatic phenotype at birth: genitalia are obvious, he could also check karyotype with a DNA test. But he has no way to know the child’s mental phenotype, the gender identity. It’s certainly true that far more people are cisgender than transgender, just as sexuality is strongly male/female bimodal and more people are straight than gay. So statistically the kid is likely to have a male gender identity and be straight. Just as a randomly selected human is more likely to be Chinese than any other nationality before we know anything about them. So what?
Your slippery slope argument has already been debunked several times. Repeating it without adding any substantive rebuttal is not a debate.
And this, right here, is the core of your problem.
After setting your sympathy to “maximum”, you’re more concerned with the definition of a word than the welfare of human beings who are suffering with a problem that (in your admission) is sincere, not made up, and awful.
You can ease a human being’s suffering by learning a new definition, and you’re arguing that you shouldn’t have to, that it’s WRONG to ask you to.
Right, because we have a social consensus on what it means to be “Lord God Almighty”, and the conditions exclude any human mortal from qualifying.
But the social consensus on what it means to be “a woman” is now shifting away from genital anatomy to gender identification. There is nothing intrinsically wrong or impossible about changing the societal definition of “woman” in that way, nor is there any Language Police to back you up when you splutter that it oughtn’t to be allowed.
I completely agree with you that if somebody claims, for example, “Caitlyn Jenner has a uterus” or “Caitlyn Jenner wasn’t born with a penis”, their statement is objectively false. But the point is that such statements are not identical to claiming “Caitlyn Jenner is a woman”, which is not objectively false, because “being a woman” involves a socially constructed identity rather than mere anatomical categories.
In the first place, social consensus about the meaning of words isn’t something people get to formally vote on. You don’t get an exemption from recognizing the existence of a particular social consensus on word meaning just because you don’t happen to like it.
In the second place, what the word “woman” has “always meant” was never as clearly defined as you mistakenly believe it was. For instance, what about intersex people born with both male and female genital anatomy characteristics, who have always existed as a small minority of humans? Has the word “woman” “always meant” them, or not?
How about people with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or AIS (who have also always existed in the human species), who are genetically male with XY chromosomes and have internal testes instead of ovaries, but have a vagina and clitoris rather than a penis? Has the word “woman” “always meant” them, or not?
The societally recognized meaning of words is not something that you personally get to “allow” or disallow.
Especially when you’re trying to base your semantic rules on false analogies. “Being a chimp” is a statement about membership in a species, which is defined only, and very unambiguously, by biology. “Being a woman” is a statement about a socially constructed identity, not about genital anatomy or chromosomes. Unless you are checking the genital anatomy and chromosomes of every female-presenting individual you meet—which I strongly doubt—you have no way of knowing for sure whether somebody you consider a “woman” is or isn’t genetically or anatomically female.
You don’t actually know what you’re talking about if the animal happens to be hermaphroditic or otherwise intersex. Even in the case of non-human animals with no (known) mental concept of gender identity, the conventional male/female binary is an oversimplification.
Possibly, but with a very low probability.
The problem here is not with using chromosomes and genital anatomy as a first-approximation useful proxy for gender identity, because they do correlate quite strongly in the overall population. (Just as it’s not unreasonable, to a lesser extent, to use gender identity as a first-approximation useful proxy for sexual orientation, because most men are in fact sexually attracted to women and most women are sexually attracted to men.)
The problem arises when ignorance and prejudice lead people to insist that, for example, the definition of “woman” MUST include being born with a vagina, or being sexually attracted to men, or liking the color pink, or any other characteristic that may be true for most people who identify as women but not all of them.
It’s not usually referred to as “gender identity” by biologists, but sexually dimorphic behavioral traits are present to varying degrees in virtually all sexually-reproducing species. Male/female differentiation between mental states is certainly not unique to humans.
Also - not that anything in this debate hinges on this question - it’s probably a mistake to assume that human gender identity is entirely a social construct. The cultural/social contribution is almost certainly much greater than in any other species, because our culture is so extensive and important. But the very fact that transgender people are often so consistent and persistent that their identity is not what might be “easiest”, it’s not what society has historically pushed them towards, strongly suggests to me that genetics along with non-cultural environmental factors make a significant contribution.
Yes, of course. My point is that there is AFAIK no evidence for linking those traits to anything like a conscious gender identity in non-human animals.
That is, for example, a male peacock displays his tail feathers to a female because he wants to mate with her, but that doesn’t mean that he’s thinking “I am a male peacock and this is what male peacocks do”.
True, but I don’t think I made that claim, and I apologize for the lack of clarity if I seemed to do so. I completely agree that individual gender identity is, at least in part, a physiologically baked-in phenomenon that doesn’t change just because society rethinks its definitions of gender.
But as a social phenomenon, gender categories are socially constructed. That is, in social interactions we don’t check people’s genitals or chromosomes before mentally classifying them as “man” or “woman”. We base that classification on a somewhat arbitrary set of qualifications, some of which sometimes have a biological basis in secondary sex characteristics (e.g., beard or no beard? high voice or low voice?) and some of which are completely separate from them and may be coded either “male” or “female” or both in different cultures (e.g., long hair or short hair? earrings or no earrings? trousers or skirt?).
That’s because reproduction of human beings isn’t a perfect process. Sometimes mistakes happen - that’s how we get birth defects. In the case of sex and gender, the more extreme examples are people with XY chromosomes who develop as female, people with XX chromosomes that develop as male, and folks with mixed up chromosomes (XO, XXY, XXXY, XYY - all sorts of things). The genitals of these folks vary from “looks completely normal” to “huh - well, hard to say.”
Sometimes it’s a more subtle issue.
But, bottom line, there are people whose gender as adults is not what it seemed to be on the day of their birth. Fortunately, it’s rare but give how many billions of people there are on the planet in absolute numbers it’s quite a lot of folks.